I found this question on Answerbag: "What is the highest count recorded by a bacterial pure culture in LB medium" on 11:34 PM, December 22. Now, this could be a question someone asked for their own curiosity or for an argument, but it sounds like a homework question. The fact that it was posted at 11:34 PM, too, sounds like someone was in the middle of doing homework.
Could someone call up their local (academic or public) library at 11:34 PM and receive help for this question? No. Even if the local academic library is open, which increasingly it might be, the librarians and/or library students aren't paid anywhere near enough to be up at odd hours and circulation staff isn't going to be able to help you. Students in New York could theoretically call Hamilton Library at 11:34PM NY time and get reference service, but no student is going to think of that. Their only option, if their school offers it, is to use a chat system.
UH-Manoa offers a 24/7 not very well marketed chat system that has "over 100 participating libraries". However, it advises "For in-depth help, you may wish to contact your subject specialist." As someone who's done general reference, I'm not sure I would be able to find an answer to the Answerbag question above. So not only would you have to find the chat reference link, which is perhaps buried on your library's website, you would have to feel comfortable chatting to a complete stranger who might not even be able to give you the best reference because they might not be a specialist.
Then, this student may head to the web and to a Social Q&A site. I won't elaborate too much on the structure of these sites since we all were on Answerbag, but like Leibenluft says, people tend to get credit for simply posting an answer on Social Q&A sites and the answer isn't necessarily correct. I think we all saw a few snippy or funny but not qualitative answers get huge numbers of points on Answerbag. It is possible for a student to get a correct answer from an expert who is browsing the site, but not always.
Leibenluft favors Wikipedia over a Social Q&A site because Wikipedia entries are edited. But besides the traditional information literacy arguments against the online encyclopedia, Duguid pulls down Wikipedia's usefulness by illustrating how one detail can throw off the coherency of an entire article. Either way, I cannot think of a substantial way for libraries to use non-internal wikis, so I will move on to Social Q&A once more.
Here are the problems I see with reference service in the current library system, and where (sometimes) Social Q&A has libraries at an advantage:
1) Library websites are not equipped for mobile technologies, as discussed in Dempsey. (Most social Q&A sites aren't either.) iPhones can load regular websites, but it requires moving the screen's focus to see the entire page which I found tiresome. A text-only mobile friendly page with the most frequently needed pages, including a "Text a librarian/chat with a librarian now!" function would help.
2) No personalization of reference:
Students like asking for help from librarians they are already familiar with (Dempsey, again). For the librarians' health it is probably better that they are not available 24/7, but in an ideal world subject specialist librarians would be accessible by some sort of message board system and by text message (school-provided number).
The student-librarian relationship could be encouraged further by a personalized login page. When a student logs in, the system would link the classes that student is taking to the broader subject and, along with providing related resources, could give the name and contact information of that subject librarian.
3) People like the "bulletin board" format of the Social Q&A.
Dempsey discusses the decisions libraries have to make about social networking technologies: does the library build its own software, wait for tech companies that make software for libraries to make the software, or jump on someone else's software? In the most dramatic course of action, libraries could pair with Social Q&A sites to have a "Expert Answers" section - where only librarians could post answers, and they would get paid to do this. Libraries would then cross-link their site to the Social Q&A site, and make the librarians answering have visible profiles (but not too specific, so not to raise privacy concerns) so that they can become familiar to the students. In a less dramatic version, libraries could implement their own bulletin-board type Q&A with the institution's own librarians answering anonymous or profiled questions.
This solution takes the "Social" out of "Social Q&A", and does leave the task of getting the information up to the authority. Individuals have a real need for specific, accurate information - like the question about bacteria up there - and due to a number of issues, including personalization and bulletin board formats, the only online reference service libraries offer (chat) is not pulling in many of the users with serious information needs. Then, they go to Social Q&A sites or Wikipedia, and receive information that may be correct, but probably isn't.
I wrote this post as pertaining to libraries, since that is my specialty, but you can see what libraries have on Social Q&A sites - authority, sometimes specialty, and often years of experience searching the web/books/databases for The Right Answer.
I wonder if having access to the right answers from experts would just make students extremely lazy cheaters. Then I would question: what are librarians for? What's their purpose? Are they people who guide others to find information for themselves, or are just the people who give answers? Leibenluft makes that point about cheaters who just don't have the right answers, but if libraries were "on-call" for the procrastinators of the world, wouldn't that be an injustice to inquiry? I suppose it's a good lesson to go back to class the night after receiving all the answers from the online world to find that everyone that answered your question were all wrong. Might be a good lesson to teach young people to think twice about looking to Social Q & A for answers rather than relying on their own thinking....
ReplyDeleteI also think there's information literacy versus information ethics. The speaker who came to talk to the LIS 670 class mentioned that young people really don't think there's anything wrong with file sharing, stealing broadband, etc. He pointed out that they might compromise security, and people's identity and possessions if they can steal online. Unfortunately, there are many adults who don't think twice about "stealing" music or videos, so how do we teach young people about not stealing information and claiming it as their own? Where are the boundaries? These are questions that came to mind based on your response to my blog. Thanks.
I'm finding that as the DOE cuts more of their librarians from their employment, classroom teachers are expected to teach the information literacy in addition to the standards that they are tasked to help students achieve. The reality in the high school and elementary school level is that there isn't enough time for solid training in information ethics. I call it ethics because we can teach the kids to cite sources, and to paraphrase, but they may not because they don't think there's anything wrong with copying someone else's work.
You're right. There needs to be vertical alignment in teaching information consumers to be responsible and ethical. We teach the public all the time about the matters of health and safety, why not intellectual integrity?
I agree with you that libraries are much better than social Q&A sites when searching for factual information. I would never dream of asking a reference question on one of those sites, but I’m a library school student so that’s to be expected. :) I think you make a very good point concerning mobile technologies. The people surfing the web on their phones or PDAs continues to grow rapidly and libraries need to take notice. One library is doing just that. The Washington, D.C. Public Library launched an iPhone application a couple of months ago: link I think that's pretty cool and hope more libraries make their websites and OPACs mobile technology friendly.
ReplyDeleteHey there, Manda. I really enjoyed reading your post. Good point about libraries not being "mobile ready." I'm guessing Dr. Gazan is equipping this group of future librarians with an eye to the future of libraries and that future screams "technology!" Since whole campuses are going paperless, it seems inevitable that libraries might go down that path as well. Not that there won't be anymore physical libraries, mind you, but there can be both, can't there? The gray area is widening (as pointed out in the first comment by j_mastin)and information is increasingly accessible with the increase in computing and bandwidth power (Moore's law, Metcalf's law, and the Bandwidth Scaling Law). As my friend Ed Flowers wrote, "The central problem for librarians and information service providers today is that the products they offer do not incorporate the kinds of media-rich environments or mobility users expect."
ReplyDeleteI guess my biggest question about librarians (at least in how they relate to this session's assignment discussion) is what exactly are their responsibilities? Are they just supposed to point the asker in the right direction (i.e. look at these resources, they can be accessed in this way), or are they also supposed to be able to find the answer for the asker? Both? You mentioned subject specialists, and it sounds like they're able to do the latter. If the latter, then j_mastin's comments about student's becoming "extremely lazy cheaters" becomes true. This is certainly something to be concerned about.
ReplyDeleteAs far as mobile connectivity goes (at least for library use), in my limited library usage experience, I initially didn't see a really big use for mobile connectivity, since if one is doing research, such a small screen might be useless anyway, but I now can see at least one usage (with the right interfaces anyway): while one is deep in the library stacks, it would indeed be very convenient to be able to look up publications/reference locations "on the spot" with a mobile device instead of having to go find a terminal (or librarian) to look things up (that is of course if one is able to get any kind of signal typically deep into the building).
I agree with point about the libraries being able to typically find more trustworthy information ("The Right Answer"); most of the information on a social Q&A site certainly needs needs to be taken with a grain of salt and re-verified if at all possible or appropriate.
Personally, I think reference librarian should not try to compare themselves to a Q&A website at all. That will be a lost cause in not too distant future. The strength of a librarian is the human interaction, a librarian shouldn't just give an answer even if that is possible, librarian should just point to the right direction, the right resources for the information seeker to do their own research to get the final answer. Librarian is responsible for information literacy, they shouldn't and do not have the capacity to answer questions in any specialized field. Even though most information seekers want instant satisfaction, but librarians should not cater to the that need. The new generation of Q&A sites will become more and more specialized in different areas, they will attract people with that kind expertise to cluster around it. That is the ideal place for an instant answer in that area and users will be attracted to that kind of Q&A site. In a word, librarian should not try to build their own Q&A site, building a Q&A site requires a different set of expertise that most librarians do not have. Even though there are still lots problem with today's Q&A site, those problem will be fixed, Q&A sites will be the primary source for people to get answer soon. Wanting to use the least effort is part of human nature, eventually everybody using a search engine to find an answer will land in a Q&A site of some sort.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your post, and the discussion following. It touches on so many important elements I hardly know where to begin. The idea of mobile-ready reference service is exciting and intriguing, but there are risks of abuse by those whose question may be an assignment and who have procrastinated about finding the answer, solving the problem, writing the paper, etc. To educators, I agree that teachers are being handed a rough deal, and to expect them to teach information literacy and ethics in addition to the standard required material is excessive. However, this brings me to a personal issue I have with education as it is handled today in many areas. We focus so much of our time teaching students specific facts (ie dates in history) and/or specific skills (ie how to solve algebraic equations) that we ignore the fact that no one person could possibly know every fact and be competent in every area of life. That's not to say that I think we should stop teaching math skills, history, science, and reading, but only to say that I think it is more important to teach people how to find answers in the vast sea of information out there, to assess the information, and to utilize it appropriately and ethically. Q&A sites are not going to go away, Wikipedia is not going to just disappear...we need to think critically about providing quality reference services when people need them and we need to educate people as I mentioned above for when there is no one "official" around to help them find the answer to their questions.
ReplyDeleteNot only does the ease and convenience of social Q&A make it easier for Student X to ask questions, it leads him/her to believe that they have done a proper search and that they have found all that is available to them. This is also the impression given by digital libraries. Often people settle for something in that query set instead of taking the search elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you about the lack of accuracy. The fact is that we don’t know the qualifications of other SNS users, we don’t know their sources and we don’t know if they are right when they answer a question. What are the chances that someone took the time to go do the research for you, to go do your work?
I really like your idea of a personal login page that provides related resources. That would definitely encourage the use of reputable sources and proper research.