People give better answers. Ask Librarians.
Recently, Betty Morganstern of AACPL posted a link to Marketplace Radio talking about ChaCha.
Today, Bernie Sloan of the Digital Reference Pages posted CNN.com article "Who gives better answers, people or computers? Ask ChaCha." While Bernie asked about libraries who text, I had a different angle...
See below for my response:
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Hi all, I've heard of a couple of academic libraries that have texting available but now i can't recall what institutions they are.
I think this is something perhaps libraries should have been on the forefront of. This could have changed the perception of libraries in the American and World mind (still could). If we're in the business of information, learning, and community (which i'd argue we are), those interactions shouldn't be limited to a physical building, face to face interaction with another human being, or even an online conversation (like through IM, email, or chat).
ChaCha provides links with each text that gives the source information. Perhaps, had libraries developed this, we could have used that link to combine David Lankes' idea of knowledge being created through conversation and context. We could still develop a system where information / knowledge transfer is done through texting, email, chat, im, f2f, and whatever else- and all those transactions are linked to your Personal Learning Area (for the lack of a better name). In honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day, perhaps we can call it your Knowledge Treasure Chest. Whatever it's called, I imagine something that looks like http://www.visuwords.com/ and that cloud is the map of our answers, sources, knowledge notes, and more. It's the connections that matter. It's always the connections that matter.
On the back end of ChaCha, the folks that answer the questions (Guides) and the folks that make the questions more succinct (Expeditors) see, in their interface, the questions that person has asked before (and their answers). This is a feature that used to exist in the old 24/7 Reference software before it merged with QuestionPoint. As a customer, if you've registered with ChaCha, you can see your previously asked questions as well... Why can't we take that capability and turn it around for better use by the customer? Make it a system that provides answers from humans (librarians), but also lends itself to the information seeker as a place to build their context, keep their answers, finds, citations, sources, ideas, etc.
Granted, i may be placing a higher worth on the kinds of questions ChaCha gets but i think there is great value here.
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What do you all think? Where do libraries fall in this? Are things like ChaCha a need?
1 comment:
While I like the idea of getting the answer in "just a few minutes", there's no patron interview to make sure the ChaCha people are giving an answer to the real question the patron is asking. Ask all reference librarians know, the question asked may have little to do with the information being sought! Other than that, my understanding of the ChaCha service is that the question IS being answered by a live human, not a machine, making the machine vs. human question a moot point.
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