November 14th, 2009 Brian Herzog
This entertained me, so I thought I’d share - Huffington Post collected some funny responses to questions asked on Yahoo Answers.
I wouldn’t call them the “funniest of all time” - most of them were snarky answers or just really bad questions. But the one about the sandwich did make me laugh out loud.
Occasionally I use Yahoo Answers to help with a patron’s question, but like with any traditional or crowd-sourced resource, it needs to be evaluated critically (and enjoyed).
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Posted under Random, Reference Question | No Comments »
November 22nd, 2008 Brian Herzog
I’m going to be visiting my family for the week of Thanksgiving, so this will be my last post until I get back. So instead of a regular reference question today, here’s a tool people can use when they’re asked questions.
It’s not just Google, it’s let me Google that for you. Of course I would never use this with a patron, but it’s “teaching moment” kind of tool, to remind people that Google is good for certain kinds of questions (it’s entertaining, but also borders on snarky).
The way it works is this: visit the website and type in the question you were asked - say, What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Click the search button, and you get a link to send back to the person who asked you the question, which shows them how they could found the answer themselves.
Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d run a few recent Reference Questions of the Week through it, to see how my answers compared with Google’s:
Google will not replace librarians, because librarians help people in was that Google can’t. And by the way, there is a similar website, but it has a bad word in the URL. Thanks, Chris.
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Posted under Library, Random, Reference Question | 3 Comments »
August 23rd, 2008 Brian Herzog
A few months ago, I listed online services that provide answers to peoples’ questions.
In the library world, the big concern is usually the quality of the answers - do these services provide the same level of quality in the answers that someone would get from a librarian?
As I read on studio twentysix2, perhaps we should be more concerned with the quality of the question.
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Posted under Conferences, Library, Random, Reference Question | No Comments »
June 28th, 2008 Brian Herzog
This isn’t a reference question, but instead is a list of a few other places where reference questions (and answers) are being archived:
Help Build a Library Q&A Custom Search
A post on the Library 2.0 Ning group mentioned a project to create a Google custom search engine of just reference questions from libraries. If your library does this, be sure to add it to the list - the more data it can search, the more useful it will be.
“The Oracle Collective”
An article in this week’s New York Times Magazine talks about asking questions on the internet, and a few services that provide answers (Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, etc). It’s an interesting article, and the recommendations at the end are worth reading. Via LISNews.
I Get By With A Little Help From MeFi
No roundup of ask-a-question resources is complete with mentioning Ask MetaFilter. MetaFilter, a.k.a. MeFi, is a community blog to which interesting websites are posted (essentially “filtering” the internet for the rest of us). In Ask MeFi, volunteers from the community provide answers to questions asked by site visitors.
Internet Public Library Reference Desk
Staffed by librarians and library students, the Internet Public Library is always a reliable source for answers. Their list of frequently asked questions isn’t as fancy as some, but it still gets the job done. (And in the interest full disclosure, I volunteered with the IPL when I was in library school.)
Surely There Is A Wiki…
Very similar to Yahoo Answers and Ask MeFi in principle is WikiAnswers. As a wiki, anyone can ask or answer a questions, and also edit existing answers. The format of a single answer can be easier that reading lots of individual replies from different people, but here you can also view the discussion of the answer. Part of Answers.com.
I know lots of individual libraries are doing this too, and some are twittering their reference questions. If you know of other good sources to ask questions online and search through answers, please share.
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Posted under Library, Reference Question | 4 Comments »
