Week Eight - Answer Boards

I had taken at a look at Yahoo! Answers a couple of times and the range and variety of questions is amazing - from the serious to the ridiculous. I had also had a 'foggy' thought that it would be good if librarians could be in on the game to demonstrate our skills and resources, not realizing that Answer Board Librarians existed.

The major obstacle to librarian involvement would be time - any time answering the board questions is either time taken out from your regular duties or out of leisure time. It would be advantageous to raise librarian's profiles and skills via the boards, but in practical terms, this is resource draining. What we really need is for people to ask librarians first, but people seem to find it easier to ask anonymous strangers online, perhaps regardless of the quality of responses, than to ask their librarian.
Niche or specific-focus answers may have success, responding to eg. medical questions, legal, children's reading, travel. This would focus the area for responses making it more manageable for librarians to be involved.

It is interesting to note that although Google Answers ended in late 2006 - the 'answers phase' of the web looks like continuing; even Wikipedia could be considered as a giant question and answer service.

In what ways might your customers like to rate or review items in the collection or services you offer?
This may be another role for the library blog, offering a rating systems or a special section for particular comments. Feedback via the library blog can be targeted towards particular services and resources, using a rating scheme of, for example, 'stars' to enable client feedback.