Competitive services
From PLN
Competitive services
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Who competes with libraries? That's a tricky question, involving philosophy, definitions of a library's mission and more.
These items--primarily by Leslie Dillon from Leader's Digest--offer some food for thought as to possible competitors to library services.
More competition for reference?
Some libraries have grown accustomed to declining numbers of reference questions over the years, and to the many new types of questions librarians get now, but there are some interesting new developments on the horizon that libraries need to keep our eyes on. Microsoft’s SearchTogether and ChaCha are two cases in point.
SearchTogether
According to Greg Notess, SearchTogether is “a fascinating exploration of ways to enable collaborative searching…[that] lets users work together on a search process, share the work, and explore results simultaneously.” The SearchTogether beta lets users divvy up the searching, designate a group to share results with, and add comments and ratings. Groups “can work together in real time or sequentially at different times.”
Microsoft’s description of SearchTogether sounds a lot like what information professionals “handle daily in reference and instructional transactions.” But (fortunately or unfortunately for us reference librarians) SearchTogether isn’t yet ready for prime time, and it’s too dependent on Microsoft software. SearchTogether users must use Internet Explorer 7, install the plug-in, have a Windows Live Messenger account, and list collaborators in their Contacts.
But it also has lots of great collaborative features, including “three types of searches, group search histories, page-level rating and commenting, automatically generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing and integrated chat.”
Others are working on similar products (Yoople!, Delver and Wikia Search). And Google’s director of product management said recently that “the nature of information discovery is changing…from a solitary activity to a social one.” These products and others to come may provide a glimpse of what’s in store.
ChaCha
ChaCha, a search engine that uses humans to answer queries, is moving into the mobile space. Scott A. Jones (cofounder of ChaCha and also of GraceNote), believes that for mobile searching to succeed, answers must be very specific. Google and others have been struggling to do this, and they’re having problems. So “having human mediation is key,” especially when the mediator is a subject expert. Right now people on the go call or text their friends when they need fast specific information. Thus far, at least 40,000 guides from all walks of life have come through the ChaCha system. Candidates need to pass a test to qualify. Questions are routed to experts if no answer is already in the database. Mahalo, another human-powered search engine, focuses on the more common questions, and Jones sees a potential partnership there. Google Mobile is great at answering simple questions like sports and weather, but Google prefers algorithms over people, so Jones doesn’t see them as a competitor. Jones is looking at using highly targeted ads as a revenue source for ChaCha.
What if?
So what should reference librarians make of new developments like these? We don’t need to panic, but we should pay attention to them, and be thinking of “what if” sorts of ideas. Can and should we use these types of products to help us provide reference services in libraries? Should library reference services get “out there” where the action is? If so, how? There are databases of answers to library reference questions. Maybe libraries and cooperatives should collaborate with these innovators. Libraries and OCLC have partnered successfully with Google, so precedents have been set.
(Greg Notess, "SearchTogether: a tech preview of social search potential," Information Today NewsBreaks, Jun. 23, 2008; Chris Dannan, "Can ChaCha’s humans compete with Google’s algorithms?" FastCompany.com, June 2008.)
Yahoo Answers: another competitor?
An article in the June 29 issue of The New York Times Magazine claims that Yahoo Answers, only two years old, is "second in popularity only to Wikipedia as a reference site." I'm not sure the article's worth reading, but here's a brief summary.
Instead of directing information seekers to citations and databases, etc., Yahoo Answers "delivers questioners to other people who simply like questions, matching inquiring minds with know-it-alls."
The author compares Yahoo Answers with Ask's retrievals, which were "hard to make heads or tails of." Before Yahoo Answers, the author just used Google. Now she goes directly to Yahoo.
She attributes Yahoo Answer's popularity to the fact that people ask questions from the heart--questions she suggests they'd be too inhibited to ask at the public library.
She mentions libraries only twice--NYPL as receiving scholarly questions and public libraries as inhibiting questions from the heart. I think she could have used the help of a real reference librarian for this article!
When I looked briefly at Yahoo Answers, it seemed to me that lots of queries were opinion questions, but there were definitely many that a reference librarian could answer probably better. Maybe Yahoo Answers will go the way of Google Answers. Remember that? It's now "retired" and "no longer accepting questions."
(Virginia Heffernan, "The oracle collective," The New York Times Magazine, Jun. 29, 2008.)
They come and they go
A note from the editor: It's worth noting that the services mentioned here are commercial web services--with everything that entails. Google Answers seemed like a possible competitor for library reference (albeit not a free one)--until Google shut it down. Realistically, the biggest web competitors to reference services may be Google itself and Wikipedia. For a quick note on the latter...
Wikipedia use grew 8,000% in five years
Wikipedia traffic has skyrocketed over the last five years, increasing nearly 8,000 percent between April 2003 and April 2008. Most of Wikipedia's visitors came via Google and Yahoo. “The site’s rapid ascent ... demonstrates the success of its collaborative nature..." according to Nielson Online.
(OCLC Abstracts, June 9, 2008.)
Related articles
- Who needs reference librarians? - Jamie LaRue discusses the jobs of reference librarians and why they remain relevant in today's public libraries.
- Face time or Facebook? - Jeff Scott considers the relative worth of technological solutions vs. face-to-face service.
- Reference - dead, alive or on vacation? - Buff Hirko offers extended commentary on the state of reference in 2005.
- Reference, research and buggywhips - Glen Holt comments on the need for cooperative reference.
- Wasting money in libraries - the LLN Peer Panel discusses reference and other issues.
- Should libraries rely on free commercial web 2.0 services? - While not directly related, it's worth noting that most competitive services mentioned here are free commercial web 2.0 services--with all that implies.
Your turn: Talk about it
Peter Murray's noted one possible competitor on the Talk page. Feel free to add more or comment on them!
