Declining that invitation: A response to jerry campbell

Reference and User Services Quarterly

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 209-212

  Sowards, Steven W ^b   Van Fleet, Connie ^a   Wallace, Danny P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA   (United States)

^b MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035589048     PISSN: 10949054     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Jerry D. Campbell, "Clinging to Traditional Reference Services: An Open Invitation to Libref.com," Reference & User Services Quarterly 39 (Spring 2000): 223-27.
2. Remarks by Joe Janes, Diane Kresh, and Roy Tennant at the 2000 RUSA President's Program on "Reference 24/7: High Touch or High Tech" are now on the Web in PowerPoint form at www. ala.org/rusa/presprog2000.html. Accessed Sept. 17, 2000.
3. See also "Special Issue: Digital Reference Services: Papers based on the Virtual Reference Desk Conference," Reference & User Services Quarterly 39 (Summer 2000): 352-90.
4. Ask Jeeves is a registered service mark of Ask Jeeves, Inc., with a home page on the Web at http://askjeeves.com. My evaluative and critical comments here are not aimed at features of Ask Jeeves or at Jerry Campbell, but rather at his invocation of some of those features to suggest the characteristics of a high-quality model for online reference service.
5. Peter Hernon and Charles R. McClure began this debate with "Unobtrusive Reference Testing: The 55 Percent Rule" in Library Journal 111 (Apr. 15, 1986): 37-41.
6. Statistical Abstract of the United States 1999, prepared by the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics, Treasury Department (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1999). The online Statistical Abstract at the Census Web site was offering many 1998 figures as late as September 2000: see for example table 26, "Resident Population - States" available online at www.census. gov/statab/freq/99s0026.txt. Accessed Sept. 17, 2000.
7. Answer Point (http://answerpoint. ask.com/0/0/0/1/communities. html), a feature of Ask Jeeves to which Campbell alludes, allows those apparently dissatisfied with their answers to post questions for review by other readers. Experienced librarians will see many questions that could be answered routinely by reference units.
8. "Association of Research Libraries Statistics: Descriptive Statistics for Academic Institutions" through 1998-1999 are available on the Web. Accessed Sept. 17, 2000, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/ newarl/dstat.html.
9. The "ARL E-Metrics Project" is being conducted by the ARL Statistics and Measurement Program: see "Measures for Electronic Resources (E-Metrics)." Accessed Sept. 20, 2000, www.arl.org/ stats/newmeas/e-metrics.html.
10. Three librarians at Michigan State University who consistently keep track of e-mail inquiries have seen their tallies rise from 659 questions in 1997-98, to 899 in 1998-99, and to 1,377 in 1999-2000.
11. David A. Tyckoson, "What's Right with Reference," American Libraries 30 (May 1999): 57-63.
12. Campbell, 227. Clearly Ask Jeeves is popular and successful in its chosen niche and makes no claim to be a library. My comments about features of Ask Jeeves flow from Campbell's choice of this kind of model as a basis for discussion.
13. On page 227, Campbell lists fourteen online services in addition to Ask Jeeves. Interested readers should also note Yahoo!'s "Ask an Expert" list. Accessed Sept. 17, 2000, http://dir.yahoo.com/Reference/ Ask_an_Expert. See also the K-12 services reviewed by the Virtual Reference Desk "AskA+ Locator Service." Accessed Sept. 17, 2000, www.vrd.org/locator.
14. This comment no longer appears at www.askjeeves.com/docs/about/ whatIsAskJeeves.html. A phrase search in www.google.com retrieves a cached version of the passage at www.lhup.edu/library/ search_engines.htm. Accessed Sept. 23, 2000.
15. For Campbell's remarks on "whole questions" see footnote 9, on page 277. The accuracy and stability of Web sites affects the online Q&A sites that rely on them: see Tschera Harkness Connell and Jennifer E. Tipple, "Testing the Accuracy of Information on the World Wide Web Using the Altavista Search Engine," Reference & User Services Quarterly 38 (Summer 1999): 360-68.
16. For an example of an AllExperts.com rating, see www.allexperts.com/ displayExpert.asp?Expert=13426. Accessed Sept. 23, 2000.
17. Without citing sources, at www. AskMe.com/ViewRatings.asppm =va&cid=822&xid=143264&page =1&vid=230461 "xuouxuou" (an individual claiming to be John Tiffany, the editor of the Barnes Review, "the nation's foremost historical revisionist journal") says that "hitler never sought to justify mass murder of jews. he was against any such project." Accessed Sept. 23, 2000. The Anti-Defamation League critiques the Barnes Review in "Willis A. Carto: Fabricating History," accessed Sept. 23, 2000, www.adl.org/ holocaust/carto.html. The Barnes Review itself is online: www. barnesreview.org. Campbell notes Ask Jeeves' Answer Point "e-mail reference service" and its use of "enthusiasts" in footnote 9 (227). In all fairness, some online "experts" provide solid answers and cite sources - but at issue is the susceptibility of naive users to inferior answers in the dotcom environment, in the absence of the quality controls that libraries can confer.