Starting on Monday, members of the public will be able to use the World Wide Web to seek answers to reference questions from librarians around the world, including some at college libraries.
The service, called QuestionPoint, will operate through a Web browser and may make some visits to the library unnecessary. The Library of Congress and the Online Computer Library Center, better known as OCLC, developed it.
A patron will gain access to QuestionPoint through his or her local library’s Web site. Questions will be routed to local libraries first. If a user’s local library isn’t open, the question will be sent to an open library elsewhere -- one that has strengths in disciplines that match the nature of the question. A librarian will pick up the question and help the patron find an answer. QuestionPoint offers a reduced subscription price for any library that agrees to help answer its inquiries.
Part of the drive behind the project is to put libraries online, because many users are going to the Internet for research. “People now are staying at home and not going to libraries,” says Diane N. Kresh, director of public-service collections at the Library of Congress. “Why not have libraries be really visible on the Web, so that people can go to library-based search systems and networks and get information that’s credible, accurate, and objective, which you can’t necessarily get from Ask Jeeves?”
She adds, “If people sitting at home access information through a Web-based information service run by libraries, it will probably raise the visibility of their local library.”
About 100 academic, public, private, and national libraries have signed up to participate. Some 260 libraries have been part of a similar, free online program called the Collaborative Digital Reference Service, or CDRS, which was not open to the public. CDRS will shut down once QuestionPoint begins running.
Ms. Kresh says that QuestionPoint is a revved-up version of CDRS, giving users more options when posing questions -- and costing libraries money. Individual libraries will be able to sign up for subscriptions for a maximum of about $2,000. Libraries that are part of consortia will be able to sign up for much less. Chip Nilges, director of new product planning for OCLC, says that future versions of QuestionPoint will offer software that allows librarians and patrons to communicate through audio and video programs. Foreign-language versions are also being planned.
News of QuestionPoint kicked up some dust on the COLLIB, an e-mail discussion list for college librarians. Some librarians said there that QuestionPoint gives patrons yet more incentive not to visit the libraries’ physical spaces.
Mr. Nilges responds by saying that “it’s a fact that users often opt to begin their search outside of the library.” He cites a survey that OCLC did about a year ago, in which most respondents said that they started their research with online search tools.
“We need to meet the patrons where they’re looking for information, whether that’s inside the library portal or outside the library portal,” he says. “We need to find a way to make our members available to them.”
But some librarians will need more persuasion. Barbara Fister, the librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, was one librarian discussing QuestionPoint on COLLIB. In an interview, she said that QuestionPoint was a product of “Jeeves envy,” referring to Ask Jeeves, an online search engine. She says librarians and people at OCLC shouldn’t try to offer a competitive service, and she predicts that QuestionPoint is going to be “a major market bomb.”
“It’s providing something completely different than what you can get at a reference desk,” she says. “This sends the message that you can go online and get your reference done and that you don’t need a library for that. In a higher-education market, that is so dead wrong. ... I look at the reference desk as a place where teaching happens.”
Background article from The Chronicle:
