John McCain mentioned in one presidential debate that Barack Obama wastefully earmarked $3 million for “an overhead projector” for Adler Planetarium. If you’re like me, you were probably thinking “What? Projectors don’t cost that much!” It’s true, the regular kind don’t, but an Adler’s Zeiss Mark VI projector does. I enjoyed reading the press release that the Adler put out in response.
Category: ‘puters
MyKLOW gets websites to libraries that need them
“The My Kansas Library on the Web project is an attempt to allow small public libraries across the state have access to high end web-based tools to facilitate easy web development.
Translation: It’s a way to make your library’s website all that it can be and more by giving you easy to use tools that are accessible from ANYWHERE there is an Internet connection.” Smart project and attractive and easy-to-use site from the Kansas Regional Library Systems and the State Library of Kansas.
the social OPAC has its own website
If you’re interested in the idea of using web 2.0 types of features in a library catalog but don’t want those features sold to you in clunky forms by your existing ILS vendors, The Social OPAC may be for you, and now has its own website and developer community. Go look! Here’s a little bit of backstory explaining what the tool is and how they’re using it at the Darien Library.
the value of social Q&A
As someone who participates in many “social Q&A” sites and who runs one, I’m always interested in seeing people talking about them. I’m much more interested in this whole phenomenon than I am in Library 2.0 generally, even though I think they’re package and parcel of the same thing: computer-mediated and -assisted interaction between people who are geographically dispersed but share other common interests. As librarians we think about this a lot. Our patron base is becoming more dispersed even as our funding basis remains, in most cases, local.
First Monday has an article this month about these sites with some hard data, “Exploring characteristics and effects of user participation in online social Q&A sites†They use data from 55,000 Yahoo Answers questions (as an aside, Ask MetaFilter just reached its 100,000th question which was sort of exciting) and do a good survey of the existing literature. It’s an enjoyable read and really comes down to an elucidation of one of the first things I learned in library school: people ask their friends to help them with their information needs before they ask experts or professionals. Getting more granular about why this may be, and shifting the arena slightly to encompass the online world, this paper examines why.
Gazan (2006) divided questioners into Specialists and Synthesists. Specialists are more like knowledge experts who provide answers without referencing other sources, while Synthesists are the ones who do not claim any expertise and provide answers with references. Gazan (2007) identified two roles of answerers as Seekers and Sloths, depending on whether they have continuous conversation/interaction with other members after posting questions. Seekers demonstrate active engagement with the community and pursue communication regarding their questions. Sloths do not pursue further interaction with community members after receiving answers to their questions.
The article also looks into the Google Answers model for some insight into why it failed while Yahoo Answers succeeded.
Overall, it appears that Yahoo! Answers has developed a responsive community in which users voluntarily participate as both consumers and contributors. In comparison, Google Answers featured many one–time consumers and a small number of contributors who could only cover one–third of questions. Based on these observations, we suppose that Google’s approach of controlling the quality of answers, by not allowing users other than pre–approved ‘researchers’ to answer queries, led to a failure of the service. Yahoo! Answers’ open participatory model, on the other hand, appears to be successful, with a strong community in place.
Meanwhile, remember ChaCha? Apparently it’s not doing so well.
Go Darien Library!
I talk a lot about things that work for small libraries with little or no tech staff and almost no budget. Sometimes it’s good to remember that larger libraries with crack staff and bigger budgets can, if they’re lucky, achieve really great things. The Darien Library website/OPAC went live this morning. Go play around with it. I daresay it’s fun. A few more comments from John Blyberg on his blog. Nice job team!