Week 8 Answer boards

I've never had much luck with answer board personally. The answers provided are vague and based on personal opinion...hey I can do that! I want something concrete here! I guess that could be a good reason to get involved, providing good quality info. But I already have enough questions here at work, why would I want to go out in my spare time and find more?


Anyway for the sake of the course here is a question I answered. There is certianly a variety of topics out there.

I can see it being another way our customers can get in touch with us. 'Ask a Librarian' service at some libraries are similar to an answerboard service, though the link above is to one that is commited to providing a staff member in real time to chat to. If the library ran an answer board service that would have to be commited to replying within a set amount of time (24 hours) otherwise questions could go unanswered until it was too late.

I is an outreach, a way of contacting potential customers that may not normally think of the library. But do I anwer questions from all over the world in the hope of attracting a local customer? Are local customers relevant if I can show that I am answering questions from library resources? I would think council would appreciate it if I spent their time and resources on their residence.

Consider is there a role for your library in “slamming the boards”? In what ways might your customers like to rate or review items in the collection or services you offer?

I wonder if council would allow me the Internet time to just flit around on the answer boards like this? It does get the libraries name out there, even if it isn't to library customers (one question answered by a librarian in Hawaii). Getting back to a more local service I think it could be very good to have our service directly rated like those on the answer board. It's often hard to determine if your solution has been benefitial to the customer. On an answer board it's annonymous and they can feel free to be more honest.

As for items within our collections I like the ideas shown in the wiki sections of this course. Customers were encouraged to write reviews on the books, a star system could be added to that to score the materials. As an answer board is not linked directly to the item then the ratings would not be useful to other customers...though still useful us. :-)