Blog Post #4: Another post about Wikipedia!?!?!

Following the thread of Louise’s post on Wikipedia…
I just finished reading a fascinating article about the online encyclopedia - Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past by the historian Roy Rosenzweig at the Center for History and New Media.
It's a really long article, nearly 50 pages printed out with the references (!!) but he writes well and it kept my interest. I'll try and summarize a few of his main points and the relevance that his discussion has to libraries and the role that librarians can play in educating users.

He starts out with some history of the 6 year old site and also some statistics that attest to its popularity. The Alexa traffic rankings (a web tracking company?) put it at number #18 - above the NY Times, the Library of Congress, and Encyclopedia Brittanica!!! With this is mind, he asks "What are the potential implications for our practice as scholars, teachers, and purveyors of the past to the general public?" Now, while he’s a historian, and is writing from that point of view, we can ask this same question as librarians – as disseminators of all types of information to the general public.

Rosenzweig goes on to recount the results of a small experiment he conducted himself to judge how well Wikipedia stacks up against other reference sources. He looked at 25 Wikipedia biographies and judged them against comparable entries in Encarta, and American National Biography Online. (ANB) When it comes to overall coverage, Wikipedia beats out Encarta, but falls behind ANB, which also has more detailed, longer entries. As for accuracy, Rosensweig found that Wikipedia roughly matches Encarta, but once again falls behind ANB. In the 25 biographies he looked at, he found 4 obvious factual errors, as opposed to the 1 error out of the ANB entries. Encarta had about 3 errors. He points out that several other studies comparing Wikipedia to other encyclopedic sources have produced similar rather favorable results. This definitely seems to support the idea of “collective intelligence” that we have discussed in class.

Rosenzweig also makes several really good points that we as librarians need to keep in mind. First - Wikipedia is merely an online encyclopedia. Many people complain about the poor quality of writing on Wikipedia – but have we ever turned to encyclopedias for inspiration and glowing prose? Also, he points out the success and popularity of Wikipedia speaks volumes about the public’s need for free and accessible information! The ANB, while perhaps the most accurate and traditionally accepted reference source, is quite expensive, and many libraries have to forego other resources in order to subscribe to it. Should we really have to make these sort of choices?

Rosenzweig says educators need to pay attention to Wikipedia because students are using it - So, of course it follows that librarians need to pay attention to Wikipedia because our patrons are using it. We need to stop bad-mouthing it, and internet sources in general, and get back to what our jobs have always been – to educate our users and give them the tools to evaluate every resource they might come across in their daily life. And if you see a mistake - get in there and change it!

Blog Post #3: How to Keep Your Library Relevant in Today’s Web 2.0 World

My thoughts first started churning when I saw this post about how to sell RSS via Tame the Web. Since the original posting, the author of the post, David Rothman, has started his own blog and has provided us with an updated post.

I was so impressed with the way in which David articulated his idea and then really sold it to his patrons. The post could alternately be titled “How to Keep Your Library Relevant in Today’s Web 2.0 World.” David, who is a medical librarian in a small hospital, describes how he set up his patrons with customized RSS feeds via Google Reader so they could stay abreast of the latest medical literature in their field. Here’s how he described the service to his hospital’s head of surgery:

“How would you like it,” I asked our hospital’s head of surgery, “if you had one list of items from news or medical publishing on exactly the information you want. Imagine you could flip through this list and check off items as ‘not interested’, ‘maybe later’, or ‘the library must get me the full text of this article’. And what if, when you wanted the full text, you could click a couple of times to order it from the library?”
His eyes widened. “That’s possible?”

My favorite part of this is that if the patrons are interested in the full text of an article they see in their RSS feed, they can simply email the citation to the library’s inbox, and the article will be delivered to them via email or hard copy, depending on the library’s subscriptions and capabilities, I assume. How cool is this?

I got to thinking about how offering this service can really revitalize special libraries and their relevance to their parent institutions. At my place of work (a large professional medical association), the library is increasingly trying to increase their visibility and relevance for employees and members. Imagine if they began to offer this service for the in-house physicians, economists, and policy experts? If they really marketed the service well, it would remind staff that they have a great resource in the library and the librarians as well. It could be pitched as a great way for staff to simplify the way in which they stay current in their field. I don’t know of many professionals who wouldn’t be interested in that. And this idea could be transferred to any type of special library that serves a specialized group of patrons, museum libraries, architecture firm libraries, military libraries, etc. There’s a lot of potential here.