Social Q&A vs. libraries

Basically, I am discussing the "mass information" vs "filtered-by-authority" battle that has been going on in librarianship in one form or another for a while. Social Q&A is the "mass information", the information given by the masses who may or may not be experts, and reference service at libraries is the filtered-by-authority version. (Your mileage may vary with a specific librarian, but let's take the benefit of the doubt and say for this case that 99.9% of librarians are good at filtering the best information for anyone that asks.) The ease and convenience of sites like Answerbag and Yahoo! Answers make it easy for Student X, who has procrastinated, to jump on the Internet and ask any old question about his/her homework.

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.

Social Capital

Both sites I chose to explore this week fall under Massa's category of "Opinion and Activity Sharing Sites", although they couldn't be more different.

My first site is Poupee Girl, a Japan-based (but also mostly available in English) site where you upload pictures of your clothes and in return receive items that you can use to dress up a doll and ribbons that you can use to "buy" other items to dress up your doll. Other users can comment or give "cute points" to your items, friend you, or send you messages.

Social capital seems to come from two places:

1) Top Ten Cute Rankings
If you receive the highest number of cute points in a specific amount of time, you will be placed on this list. My guess is people who have high numbers of friends and are already trusted as fashion authorities make this list.

For someone to make this list, they also must be following the extensive Poupee Girl rules list, which declares among other rules that you are not allowed to post pictures that show your face, or pictures that you did not take yourself. Users trust that others will follow these rules and when they do not, they tend to get reported and banned.

2) Number of Friends



(Some parts of the site are yet untranslated from Japanese; the message title says "A message from a new Poupee fan.") I was friended by this user who simply said "Hi! Friends?" Your home page tracks the latest posted items of your friends and then you can easily click and give them cute points or comments, so those with more friends are likely to end up on the Top Ten Cute Rankings and gain even more friends and social capital.

The focus in the site is strongly on fashion. Ellison et al says that "Online SNSs support both the maintenance of existing social ties and the formation of new connections," but it seems that in Poupee Girl, like in my previous exploration of last.fm, there is a lot of random friending that goes on based on whether someone likes the contents of someone else's closet - even if one user is in Machida and the other is in the middle of the Midwest. When I posted pictures of items in my wardrobe many random users stopped by and left cute points, leading me to conclude from my small amount of time that many contacts in this social network are made only online.

Does Poupee Girl give the same sort of bridging social capital that Ellison et al discusses? Yes, to a small extent. Those who participate in the site may love fashion and have a career interest in it, and may make contacts and friends from various walks of life and in various places.

The second site I explored was StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon has friending, private messaging, and groups, but the main idea of the site is to "stumble upon" sites on the web that you think are interesting and add them to the StumbleUpon database by pressing an "I like it" button. Then, others rate and review the site you just posted.

Users gain social capital by:

1) Stumbling upon and rating items that receive good reviews.
This is similar to the system for Slashdot that Massa discusses - recently popular Stumbles end up on the top of each category page.


2) Having other users subscribe to your favorites.
Users subscribing to your favorites indicate that they like and trust your taste in links. Here, for example, is someone else's subscriber information:


3) Having other users leave you a positive testimonial.
Testimonials are reviews of a user's stumbleupon choices - similar to having someone subscribe to your favorites, simply more qualitative.

Even though I reviewed a few items on StumbleUpon, I did not receive any feedback or friend requests. It seems this site requires more time to get "settled in" and earn social capital than Poupee Girl, where other users are quick to give you a few cute points.

Gleave et al's article about different social roles is difficult to apply to either of my chosen sites because both have a central authority. Poupee Girl's, the Japanese blog giant Ameba, seems to control most aspects of the site and there is little self-regulation (although you can report an illegal user). StumbleUpon seemed like it could have several roles, such as those who tend to rate and comment, and those who tend to subscribe to others' feeds. Both sites do have aspects of the decentralization that Allen discusses simply because there is user-generated content, but there is not quite the level of self-policing that goes on in, say, Wikipedia.

Erilymaz's article was even more difficult to apply since my sites dealt with fashion and cool things on the internet - not, say, an emergency response system for firefighters. Trust in an incident reporting system is way more important than trust in a fashion social networking site, and somewhere in the middle is trust for buyers and sellers in selling sites like eBay.

In terms of the final project, I am thinking of exploring the issue of fake
identity creation on the Internet, perhaps comparing the creation of fake identities on Facebook or Myspace versus in other venues where the focus is less on an individual and more on a hobby. All of our readings this week were about trust, and I started wondering about trust on social networking sites where you feel you are talking to a specific person, but it may not be who you think you are talking to at all.