IL2009: Social Reference: Harnessing the Hive Mind
Social Reference: Harnessing the Hive Mind
Speaker: Margaret Smith
The social reference model involves one person posting a question, and then some other person in the community posting an answer (or multiple answer posts occur sometimes). Some examples of social reference sites: Yahoo! Answers, Askville, Wikianswers, Wiki Answeres, Vark.com, AskMetafilter, Answerbag, Wikipedia Help Desk, Maholo Answers, Fluther, etc.
Not all hives are equal. Some of them require a fee to join the group. She talked about the Library Society of the World’s FriendFeed room as well, which is a place where librarians’ posted questions and social networking additions are posted through a FriendFeed hack. It functions as somewhat of a replacement for the old STUMPERS list. She noted that there are very few problems on these sites with people posting inappropriate posts. The problem is usually that the flow of questions into the site is greater than the people who provide answers can answer quickly. A number of libraries have started blogs as question and answer boards. Baruch College has a communal reference blog where reference librarians can all post, and customers/users can post comments on any post.
If you are going to set up a social reference site yourself, you need to think about
- what technology you are going to use – wiki, blog, other?
- scope – what is the scope of your question answering going to be?
- staffing – who is going to answer the questions?
- moderation – will you moderate; if yes, who?
- maintenance of the technology – back-up, migration
- maintenance of the information – making sure that the information is up to date, or simply trust the users to know that anything posted years ago may not be accurate any more.
She talked about Slam the Boards, started by Bill Purdue. Librarians go out to these sites once a month, answer questions and promote themselves as librarians. There are two products that she recommends.
il2009
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