-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.
