-online production vs. in-person collaboration
-social tagging vs. professional cataloging and classification
-social recommender systems vs. real-world advice seeking
-social Q&A sites vs. libraries or schools
Through our readings, a Librarians Worst Nightmare I discovered Yahoo answers.. amazing that I never knew about this site!
I began a comparison of that site and the Hawaii State Public Library site to try to gain a perspective on how they could benefit one another and also what would be a trade-off in using either one.
On the Yahoo answers home page
There are tabs where you can ask, answer, or discover, and a constantly changing "featured content question". There is also a recent tab and a popular tab option, including advertisement of mobile capability option. According to Leibenluft's article and evident when researching the Yahooanswer site, there is a push for quantity over quality and often repeated questions.
Comparing this to the Hawaii State Public Library site's home page
The HSPLS has various ways to search for information such as subject, topic, databases, etc.
including a "ask a Librarian" option
The ways that I think these two sites could benefit from eachother would be that the HSPLS system could examine the user-friendly style of Yahoo answers.. the plain truth is using the HSPLS site is not user-friendly, answers are not immediate and the site itself could probably do with some updating in regards to its appearance.
The Yahoo site has more cute images and may be easier to use, but the sources are not reliable and the answers are not as immediate as one would think:
Notice the many questions with no answers.. hmmm.. not as immediate as what I expected..although in the popular section there are quite a few answers:
I think the two could benefit eachother by learning from eachother's site- perhaps HSPLS could make its site more user friendly with a more updated appearance while the Yahooanswer site could perhaps offer links to reliable resources.
In addition, the increased usage of smart devices. As Dempsey's article stressed "services may be made mobile–ready, as with special mobile interfaces for library services, alerting services, and so on. Second, mobilization continues the restructuring of services, organizations and attention that networking has brought about. Think here of how to socialize and personalize services; how to adapt to collection and service use ... how to position and promote the library ‘brand’ as services..." The HSPLS site is often slow, and although they now offer the option of downloading ebooks, I have heard from some friends that it can be difficult to connect to the site.
Trade off is simple- with Yahoo the trade off is less reliability while the HSPLS site trade off is possibly inconvenience and a slower website. With the HSPLS site, the user may have to learn how to find resources on that site by using relevant search terms instead of the question/common language terms that Yahooanswers utilizes.
Both sites can be resourceful in their own rights- but for more reliable information on important topics, I would most definitely use library resources.
Hai Caloha,
ReplyDeleteYour posting about Yahoo Answer turn me to take a look at the site more seriously. I know about the site long time ago, but I never realize that there are "many questions with no answers" until you mentioned here. I agree with you on the appearance of this site. It is amazing. I like the representation of Avatars, category of Q&A into several topics, and answers international. In addition, I also like the way Yahoo categorizes the Q&A into "Newest" and "Popular".If the library website can be design like the Q&A forum like this, I think students will more likely to use the library Q&A forum for having their discussion.
I agree with you viewpoint that a good Q&A site should be both professional and leisure, standard and fancy. It sounds like dilemma, but is actually a kind of mix. I wonder if there are some kind of connection within Yahoo Answer and some authority sites, like links to a library or organization's website?
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you about the HSPLS site. It absolutely needs to be revamped. I also agree that it is slow and sometimes hard to connect to. HSPLS really would benefit from getting a little more "yahoo" in it. The layout, design and even the color scheme would be a good addition.
ReplyDeleteI looked at the Seattle Public Library website for my comparison and had the same experience you describe for the HSPLS site. It's understandable that libraries don't want to include too many ways to directly access information through their websites, after all they do want the people to actually come to the library, but beyond that they also make the information that is available hard to find, and the navigation of the sites if often non-intuitive. Looking at HSPLS's site, it really doesn't encourage you to find out anything beyond opening hours and maybe search for items in the catalog. I think adding some "features" that are already in use in libraries could really add some life to the site, such as lists of boos recommended by librarians, or a "what's new" section, or a "theme of the months" listing interesting materials about a certain topic... like virtual displays. That would not only make the site more interesting but encourage visitors to actually go to the library in order to get the items they can see on the website.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing I hate most about the HSPLS website is how the top menu bar selections disappear if you mouse over them, then move your cursor too far down and don't bring it back up in time. It's not hard to move the cursor slowly, but it isn't user-friendly and wastes time.
ReplyDeleteOn Yahoo Answers, the better responders include a link to their source material, usually something that at least appears reputable. A lot of users don't though, just posting whatever their opinion is. I know that for me, I may know the answer to a question, but don't remember where the source came from. I could search for a source, but if I could do that and find a source, I feel as if the person asking the question could have done the same, and thus no longer feel like doing all of his work for him.
One way to understand the difference between two organizations that seems to be about the same thing--answering people's questions--is to compare the rewards for the answerers. I'm sure many professional librarians would love to send 100% of their time answering questions (from home!), as opposed to doing all the administrative tasks, attending meetings, etc. that take up most of the bullet points on a librarian's job description, and most of which are necessary to keep a physical library running. I have seen several library systems that allocate several librarian hours per week to e-reference, but excelling at that task isn't how you get promoted. On Yahoo Answers and other social Q&A sites, you get things like points that have no value, or at least acknowledgement that your work helped someone.
ReplyDeleteOne consequence of what you're proposing might be that HSPLS maintain a staff of individuals who answer questions in something close to real time, which would make the current HSPLS site look a great deal more active...until you consider the issues of answer quality and patron privacy. They could also invite patrons to ask and answer questions on the HSPLS site, but that would have its own drawbacks. Philip's blog this week discussed what the Seattle Public Library is doing in this area; seeing how librarians are dipping their toes into social computing tools is the best way to start.
Your girl still wanna do extra work? email me :)
ReplyDelete