ANSWER BOARDS

My first encounter with answer boards on Yahoo!7 answers seemed to be full of silly questions that bored teenagers must have posted. Although having looked a bit further I could see that there were serious questions in amongst them. I posted one question to see the response but received no response at all. It was a question about deleting multiple emails on Outlook express that I could have asked a colleague or looked in a computer book about. I assume that it was such a basic and uninteresting question that no one bothered to respond to it.

Working on the information desk of my library, recommending that a borrower use an answer board did cross my mind a few times. Sometimes I get asked a question that is a bit unusual and not really a thing that you are going to find in a reference book or database. Usually they are the questions that you ask your colleagues about on the off chance they will know something. Unfortunately I can't think of an example of this. I think answer boards would be perfect for some questions. The problem is again for this and a lot of this library 2.0 stuff that it is inexcessable for people who cannot use the internet (eg some(most) older people).

The idea of troops of librarians decending like ninjas on to these answer boards and answering questions seemed like a great idea. It kind of globalizes the local library. Some of the example answers on the slamming the boards wiki were excellent. I wonder though in a way who should fund such a thing. I assume that the librarians who are slamming the boards are doing it either outside of work time or when there is a quiet time in the library. If they were paid to do it how could you justify someone spending time answering queries from another city, state or country. If you had some kind of international agreement that each library donated so many hours to answering international queries that would seem a bit fairer. I would hate to see a system develop where borrowers have to pay for an answer for a query.

I can see how, as well as getting great answers, it also promotes libraries and the role of information librarians. I would like to see some kind of local answerboard for my library or the state library. It will only encourage people to use there local library.