Session 5: Social Q&A vs. public and academic libraries

For this session I chose to compare social Q&A sites and online reference service provided by public and academic librarians. Libraries now make available a variety of channels for users to ask librarians reference questions. In addition to the old standbys, phone and in person service; email, chat and IM are now offered. Our own library has an Ask-A-Librarian service via chat:



We are already familiar with social answering sites thanks to our Answerbag assignment from Session 3. Both social Q&A sites and ask-a-librarian services have a similar purpose, to provide answers to questions. I think very few would argue that the answers found on social Q&A sites are more informative and reliable then from an ask-a-librarian service. Yet despite this droves are visiting sites such as Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag and asking serious reference questions. The unreliability of the information found on social Q&A sites is a major weakness. A major weakness of online ask-a-librarian services is usability and awareness of said services. So in what ways can the weaknesses and strengths of these two services inform the other?

One weakness of ask-a-librarian services is, to put it bluntly: they’re boring. Most library online reference service sites are spartan and lack the fun bells and whistles of social Q&A sites. Funding is part of the problem but perhaps also the perspective of the librarians creating these sites and services has an impact. As an associate university librarian said from a 2003 OCLC report: “Librarians have made retrieval and accuracy a god—disregarding what users’ preferences are. ” (http://www.oclc.org/reports/escan/social/satisfaction.htm )


So what do users prefer? Well one lesson gained from social Q&A sites is users like the ability to create an online identity. Social Q&A sites let users upload a picture or avatar and enter personal information like interests and activities. I imagine it wouldn’t be too difficult for a university library or public library to allow for users to create a profile. Our Laulima system gives us the ability to do that. Here’s mine:

Users shouldn't be the only ones creating profiles, the actual librarians answering questions should be encouraged to provide substantial profiles. From our reading by Dempsey: “Connaway and Radford (2007) note how students are sometimes reluctant to use virtual reference because they do not want to interact with somebody who remains anonymous or who they do not know, even if it is a library service.” Use of profiles might make some users a bit more comfortable speaking up about their information needs.

Most social Q&A sites have searchable archives. This is helpful for information seekers because they can quickly find their answer without waiting. Most library reference services do not have a searchable archive. While its true library web sites often provide subject bibliographies and faqs they rarely provide transcripts of resolved reference questions. I think it would be a benefit to all to allow users to view previous reference questions and their answers. Of course with this, the issue of privacy can be a roadblock. Perhaps a way around that is providing users with a choice of hiding their question or remaining anonymous.

With an archive users can see what people have asked previously and what kind of response they received. This can lessen the fears some may have of asking a librarian a question. From my own experience and from projects in other classes I believe many people are not comfortable using library reference services. There are various reasons why this may be the case whether a person is shy, prefers to find information on their own or views librarians as unapproachable. By showing the past experiences of information seekers users can gain confidence that the librarian will not be mean and bite their head off. Users may even find the answer to their question or at least the means to find it.

Now that we have examined how libraries can learn from social Q&A sites what can libraries teach them? As stated earlier I believe the major drawback to social Q &A sites is the unreliability and likelihood of receiving inaccurate or unhelpful information. Librarians are trained to provide trustworthy reference service; a user on Yahoo! Answers is most likely not. One way I think social Q&A sites can build trust is by using and identifying experts. A lot of social Q &A sites have categories. I imagine that in addition to all the other categories you can create one called “ask an expert”. Trained professionals would only answer questions in this category. In a way you are simply including an ask-a-librarian service within the social Q&A site; of course the experts wouldn’t have to be librarians but simply well researched in a particular field. This would cost money and to be honest I don’t really see social Q&A sites adopting this but it is a way of addressing the lack of trained professional service that librarians provide.

A lot of what librarians do is teaching patrons what is available and how to navigate all the different resources to find an answer. Librarians don’t only provide answers but they provide directions to answers (go here or look there). One way that social Q&A sites can help users find information is by in addition to allowing users to answer questions also provide informational links. Librarians provide subject bibliographies. Perhaps social Q&A sites can do the same. I imagine on the “home” page of each category links to trustworthy sites can be shown. Users can still answer questions and they may choose to ignore these links but at least they are there.


Another way to work towards ensuring trustworthy answers is by altering the points system. Reward factual and accurate answers and punish false ones. However, I don’t see that being very popular with the users of the sites. The users of Yahoo! Answers and Answerbag have manipulated and created what those sites are. They are happy with the social forum where they can spout off whatever questions or opinions they have. Jacob Leibenluft says in the reading “A Librarian’s Worse Nightmare”:

“After all, while Yahoo! Answers and its peers are classified as reference tools, what they actually provide is social networking. ”

I agree with this statement.  Yahoo Answers and others like it should not classify themselves as reference tools. But I think, for the most part, they don't. Answerbag says it is “a community of people helping others.” 

I also believe there should be disclaimers on the reliability and accuracy of the information found on the site. Answerbag, on the "about us" page, warns users to be cautious of trusting the information found on the site. That’s great but would it hurt them to plug the library somewhere on the page? ;)

From my examination of social Q&A sites and library reference services I found that while at the surface they may look similar under closer inspection they provide very different services. Even so, they can inform each other. 

Social Q &A sites are more of a social networking service while online library reference service is a no nonsense reference service. Libraries have done a lot over the past few years to provide trustworthy reference service in a myriad of ways so users can choose what is most convenient and comfortable. Yet I believe many people don’t have librarian at the top of their list on who to consult for their information needs. There is still a lot of work to be done to promote the reference services librarians provide. Taking steps to make reference services more user-friendly like providing profiles and searchable archives may make library reference service more popular and successful. Social Q&A sites are good at what they do, providing a forum for users to share thoughts and opinions. They are not so good at providing accurate and factual information. Using librarians or other trained professionals as well as incorporating subject bibliographies could help with this weakness.

Session 4 Trust mechanisms

For the session 4 assignment I examined the trust mechanisms in place at two websites: couchsurfing.com and thisplaceiknow.com. Couchsurfing.com was mentioned in the reading by Massa and sounded right up my alley. And I chose thisplaceiknow.com for no other reason then I was looking for a travel-related site. The reading by Massa was easy to read and written in a language I could understand, which is slightly different from the readings from the Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. These readings made me wish I paid more attention in the political science measures and analysis classes I took as an undergrad. A lot of it went over my head (I never knew friending a friend of a friend was formally called Triadic Closure Bias, LOL ( from Forming Social Networks of Trust to Incentivize Cooperation)) But back to the two websites.

Couchsurfing.com is a place where people can find free lodging. Everyone has a profile and it displays whether you are able to host travelers or maybe just offer a ‘coffee or a drink.’ Because offering your home to someone or entering a stranger’s home can be potentially dangerous, strong trust mechanism are essential for this site. There are such mechanisms in place. One is ‘vouching for.’ From the website: “When someone is vouched for, it signifies an elevated level of trust in the community. The only way to become vouched for is to be extremely trusted by someone who has been vouched for by three other members. You must know each other in the real world. If you are a trusted friend, the vouched member can vouch for you. Once you have been vouched for three times, you can in turn vouch for members you sincerely believe to be trustworthy . “ This may make things difficult for new members to get involved but couchsurfing has suggestions for new members: “Are you new to CouchSurfing and don't know any members just yet? Easy. Go and surf with someone, or host someone, or just meet someone in your hometown who has been vouched for three times. After they meet you and get to know you, they can vouch for you.” It may be a challenge to be vouched for but finding other users near you and spending time with them seems to be the easiest step. Of course this mechanism can be manipulated. Someone who has the ability to vouch can possibly be bought or corrupt in some way. A lot is dependent on the integrity of the users. One has to have faith that the majority of people are honest and not corrupt and the trust mechanisms work as they should.

Another way to evaluate the trustworthiness of a potential host or hosted is through their references. Here people can say whether they have met this person and describe their experiences with them, this includes whether they surfed with them or hosted them or are just friends with them.

One more way to determine whether a person is a psychokiller or not is through their friends. Each profile includes friends (if they have any). Included with pictures of "friends" is information like whether they have met face to face, the level of their friendship, how they became friends, as well as a small text contribution (optional).

Here's some pics from a random profile, I found most profiles have a lot of information. That's good because more information can lead to more trust and an easier and more accurate determination of who this person is.

The other site I examined was www.thisplaceiknow.com At this site people post reviews of different places all over the world (though it looks like the vast majority is in the US), it can be a restaurant, park, city, landmark, etc. As opposed to couchsurfer this site does not have extensive trust mechanisms in place. Getting advice on where to go is not typically approached with as much caution as sharing a roof but still some trust is involved. Often when I travel my time is limited, I am not able to see and experience everything so good tips on where to go are appreciated, and bad tips are frustrating. I believe the idea of this site is great but the reality of the site is not. There are few trust mechanisms in place, anyone with an email address can join and put whatever nonsense they like. As evidenced from this.

I will be removing this as soon as I find out how, I don’t want to mess up the site . Though I will be interested to see if someone catches it first and has it removed. After all there are now only 1402 places on the site, so if any administrators are monitoring new places added it won’t be hard to find.

Like couchsurfer.com and many other sites thisplaceiknow.com includes profile pages, which in a way is a trust mechanism. It is way to learn more about the real person behind the online screen name. At this site profile pages include "friends" and self-disclosed information about interests, hobbies, hometown, etc. The information listed is not nearly as extensive as at couchsurfing.com. There also seems to be more instances of tongue-in-cheek humor and goofing around. It’s hard to tell from the limited information provided if a given person has similar tastes and whether I would trust them for travel advice.

A lot of the findings of the readings are backed up in my examination for session 4.
The reading by Massa describes some differences between trust relationships in the real world and online. Two differences that occurred on the site couchsurfing.com were “explicitness and visibility of trust statements” and “disproportion in positive trust.” Disproportion in positive trust is particularly interesting to me. Couchsurfing.com states that there have been: "2,453,253 positive experiences, which is an incredibly high 99.802 percent of all member experiences!" Nearly 100% of experiences were positive. Do you think that is truly the case? Perhaps when a negative experience or a neutral but bordering on negative experience occurs people choose to not provide feedback. Perhaps there is fear of retaliation if you provide negative feedback. Such a proportion of positive feedback may lead you to distrust or suspect this particular trust mechanism. Luckily there are other mechanisms on the site that lessen the fears users may have with hosting or being hosted.

The reading by Eryilmaz, et. al. described trust issues in an emergency response information system. The study found that “Monrovia City EOC staff wanted to see some form of verification in order to trust the information posted.” Couchsurfers.com has a verification process that involves locking your name and making a donation using a credit card to verify your address, verification is optional and is another mechanism to build trust on the site. Another finding from this reading was that the different entities used their own terminology that was not understood by all entities involved. The study found the need for a common terminology. While I did not find an exact correlation there is the simple fact that human beings trust people that look, sound and act similar to them. If you view a profile with a lot of slang that you don’t understand that may lead you to bypass that person for someone more like yourself and therefore more trustworthy. (of course there are other variables on why you may or may not trust someone, life experience being one major one) Then again you could be a particularly brave person and more interested in “bridging”, if so you would likely pursue people with different views and backgrounds than yourself but that doesn’t necessarily mean you trust them more, right?

A mechanism for verification would certainly help the site thisplaceiknow.com. Currently there is no way to verify the information posted. I would recommend being able to “vote” on a posting as well as a profile. You can vote on whether a posted place or profile is helpful or not. This could help to weed out false or too little information. The reading Gleave et. al. explored the idea of social roles in online communities. I believe thisplaceIknow would benefit from leaders emerging and becoming key contributors. It is difficult to tell who is administrating the site and if anyone is working to filter out false information.

Overall I found the trust mechanisms of the site couchsurfing.com to be excellent and thisplaceIknow.com to be poor. At thisplaceiknow.com there are too few mechanisms in place and the ones in place do not elicit a great deal of trust. It should be noted however that iknowthisplace.com has much fewer users than couchsurfer.com. I think a lot more users and more ways to express trust statements would vastly improve the site.

In terms of a final project, gosh I'm having a hard time finding a topic. Earlier I expressed interest in looking at the differences between online relationships and offline, the differences in etiquette and how different are these relationships. I think that they are more similiar than many realize. Hmm, I'm still thinking about it. Maybe I can gain some inspiration from my classmates or join a classmate with a project. I'll keep you updated.

UPDATE on final project proposal 3/8 11:33AM:

I’m not sure if my proposal will be accepted because it veers a bit from the topics covered in the syllabus. For my final project I would like to explore Google Books (GB), it’s relationship with libraries and I would specifically like to address the way in which it “catalogues” the digitized books. (I am also taking cataloguing this semester and it’s always nice when you can put together what you’ve learned from other classes.) I imagine in my paper I will provide some background information on GB and its relationship with various libraries. Then I will examine the way GB catalogues, the metadata used. I will compare this to MARC and Library of Congress Subject Headings used in traditional “brick and mortar” libraries. I wonder if GB are using these standards. I will also examine what GB and traditional libraries can learn from each other regarding accurate and user-friendly information retrieval. In terms of research, I like the First Monday online journal, I did find one article regarding this topic there: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1972/1847 I will also search Library and Information Science Abstracts, scholarly cataloguing journals, as well as the always helpful big databases like Academic Search Premiere and Lexis Nexus. I will search Google Books information releases, I’m not sure how transparent they are regarding cataloguing, indexing and metadata. Finally I will examine online resources including blog posts, of course I will be careful with these sources, but I believe they can be helpful and can lead one to more scholarly and “trustworthy” sources.

Update 11:52 

I might have jumped the gun a bit on my proposal, I can see how this might not be appropriate for this class as there seems to be a lack of "social" involved. I guess I got a little excited because it is something I am interested in. So if this proposal is shot down my second proposal would be to examine user tagging in academic and public libraries. I would explore what it is, are any libraries currently doing it, what are the pitfalls, drawbacks. I guess the big question is "Is it worthwhile, should libraries embrace user tagging of library resources?" 

I would use the same resources mentioned above.