On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 18:37, Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> For example, one of the most often asked questions is "Where is the bathroom?"
Ask yourself this; do you need a library degree to answer that question? :)
> In my own experience, I get the most questions concerning systems: "How do I get onto JSTOR?"
Again, this is just a technical thing which the library degree means
nothing. Let's jump then to what reference librarians are great at ;
> It's only when people have exhausted every avenue they can think of that they come to ask a reference question, and they are more-or-less desperate. That's when they tend to listen more and you can really help them at that point. After that, these same people have no problem at all coming back and asking you more questions.
Not sure you viewed the whole thing, but all of the data in WA is
screened, tuned, verified, cleaned and shaved, and any question that
you also can compute on, it can deliver some (pretty good) answers to,
question no reference librarian with a million books can answer (like,
the weight of a water molecule divided by the height of the Eifell
tower", just in case you wanted to know ...)
So anyone doing research on the topic itself is the audience here, not
people who specifically want books. This is about facts, not about
writing them down. Again, as I've postulated before, these systems are
not going to get worse over time, rather the opposite. More and more
sources which in the past delivered books and journals (which is the
librarian domain) will be delivering data directly to these data
crunchers, and now that the data crunchers gets *this* sophisticated,
there is lots of what used to be librarian domain that gets ripped
out.
Just like Google has chipped away at the librarian world, so will
this. And so will many, many more such systems. They will get better
and better, until a point where there is no more need for librarians.
Then what? And how long will this take? (And I think I know most of
the answers coming to this one :)
> What I'm saying is that people have a lot more problems than they let on when trying to find information. This is another discussion though.
Not sure it is; people are hence far more inclined to use this kind of
tool than the librarian. Just more depressing reality.
As to Wolfram selling a product ; please, he's got 27 years of some
serious heavy-hitting credibility to his name. He doesn't sell
anything, he offers up stuff that works, otherwise he wouldn't do it.
This isn't just some guy with a startup we're talking about here. :)
Regards,
Alex
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Received on Mon May 04 2009 - 09:39:17 EDT