PANEL Social Reference and Digital Reference: Online question answering practices in two diverse communities Pnina Shachaf School of Library Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. shachaf@indiana.edu 1320 East Tenth Street, LI005A, Bloomington, IN 47405-3907 Howard Rosenbaum School of Library Information Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. hrosenba@indiana.edu 1320 East Tenth Street, LI001, Bloomington, IN 47405-3907. Eileen Abels The iSchool at Drexel. eileen.abels@ischool.drexel.edu 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-2875 Marie Radford School of Communication, Information Library Studies, #8232;Rutgers University. mradford@scils.rutgers.edu 4 Huntington Street, Room 329 #8232;, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1071. Lynn Silipigni Connaway OCLC connawal@oclc.org Online Computer Library Center, Inc. Rich Gazan Department of Information Computer Sciences, University of Hawaii at Manoa. gazan@hawaii.edu 1680 East West Road, POST 314D, Honolulu, HI 96822. Chirag Shah School of Information Library Science, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. chirag@unc.edu CB#3360, 100 Manning Hall, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3360.

This panel brings together researchers who focus on Q A sites, those that focus on digital reference, and those who bridge between the two, into what we believe will be a lively discussion.
Sponsorship: SIG-SI; SIG-BWP; SIG-USE

Social reference refers to online web-based question-answering services provided by volunteers on Q A sites. These Q A sites, like other web 2.0 participatory social sites, such as Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia, are flourishing. Even though the number of visits to these sites increased by 889 percent in just 2 years, from 2006 to 2008 (Hitwise, 2008), and they attract as much traffic as Flickr (Quantcast, 2008), they have not attracted as much research attention. This may be partially due to the novelty of the phenomenon and partially due to the fact that these sites are female dominated (Hitwise, 2008); Q A sites attract mainly stay at home moms and teenagers (Harper, 2008), unlike the male dominated Wikipedia community. Amid the introduction of ideas such as the 'wisdom of the crowd' (Surowiecki, 2004), 'here comes everybody' (Shirky, 2008), and 'everything is miscellaneous' (Weinberger, 2008), many traditional conceptions of information creation, dissemination, seeking, and use are being challenged. It is possible that on social Q A sites, the conceptions of the reference encounter are challenged as well. For example, by the utilization of wikis and the exploitation of user participation through collaborative processes, the dyadic reference encounter is no longer the norm. Although social reference and Q A sites follow a long tradition of library reference (Harper et al., 2008; Shachaf, 2009), specifically online reference services, reference research and research on Q A sites are mostly detached from one another. Research on Q A sites primarily includes efforts to incorporate social dimensions into the retrieval mechanism (e.g., Adamic, et al., 2008; Bian et al., 2008); only a few studies have linked or compared library reference services with online question answering sites (Harper et al., 2008; Shachaf, 2009). Reference research and social reference research can inform each other.

The potential and risks associated with social sites seem to be contested. Much has been written about the danger and challenges that 'the cult of the amateurs' brings to our society, economy, and cultural institutions (Keen, 2007), but at the same time, research on Wikipedia, for example, suggests that the crowd produces an encyclopedia that is easily keeping up with traditional encyclopedias (e.g., Emigh Herring, 2005; Giles, 2005; Rosenzweig, 2006).

It is possible that social sites that produce encyclopedic knowledge and those that provide question answering services are as good as or even better than their predecessors. Q A communities provide services that are comparable to library reference services; these may resemble (Shachaf, 2008), surpass (Harper et al., 2008), or may be limited (O'Neil, 2007) compared to (traditional and digital) library reference services. One way or another, reference research cannot ignore this booming phenomenon as much as reseach on social Q A sites cannot ignore the long tradition of reference research. This panel brings together researchers who focus on Q A sites (Gazan, Rosenbaum, Shachaf, Shah), those that focus on digital reference (Abels, Connaway, Radford), and those who bridge between the two (Abels, Shachaf), into what we believe will be a lively discussion. Each panelist will first present a particular question answering service or a comparative analysis of a few question answering services. Abels will focus on the IPL and will talk about "Ask an IPL Librarian." Radford and Connaway will focus on live chat VRS, including OCLC Question Point and will present "Quality Inquiry: User Perspectives on Virtual Reference Practice." Shah will focus on Yahoo! Answers and will talk about "Caching on the Wisdom of Crowds for Question Answering". Gazan will focus on Answerbag and will present "Dimensions of Trust in Social Reference." Shachaf will present a comparative analysis of several Q A services (Answerbag, Askville, WikiAnswers, Wikipedia Reference Desk, and Yahoo! Answers) and online library reference services and will talk about "Social Reference vs. Digital Reference: Quality Assessment." Then the entire panel and the audience will be engaged in a discussion of the following questions:

  1. What do we know about Q A sites, online library reference services, chat services, and web-based form reference?
  2. To what extent do Q A sites pose a threat to library reference work?
  3. How can we best evaluate the quality of interactions and answers on each of these reference services?
  4. How do Q A sites compare to digital reference services in terms of answers provided?
  5. What types of answers do users prefer?
  6. What are the motivations for the askers and the answerers for their participations on Q A sites?
  7. What are the costs and benefits or pros and cons of Web 2.0-like participatory Q A sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, compared to more digital reference-like services, such as IPL?
  8. What are the different uses, expectations, and motivations for social Q A vs. traditional digital reference services?

Adamic, L. A., Zhang, J., Bakshy, E., Ackerman, M.S. (2008). Knowledge sharing and Yahoo! Answers: Everyone knows something. In WWW '08: Proceeding of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web. NY; ACM. pp. 665-674.

Bian, J., Liu, Y., Agichtein, E., Zha, H. (2008). Finding the right facts in the crowd: Factoid question answering over social media. International World Wide Web Conference. Beijing, ACM. pp. 467-476.

Emigh, W., Herring, S. C. (2005). Collaborative authoring on the Web: A genre analysis of online encyclopedias. Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-38). Los Alamitos: IEEE Press.

Giles, J. (2005, December 14). Internet encyclopedias go head to head. Nature. Retrieved January 10, 2009 from http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html.

Harper, F. M. (2008). Q A still overlooked. Retrieved January 10, 2009 from http://maxharp3r.wordpress.com/

Harper, F.M., Raban, D., Rafaeli, S., Konstan, J.A. (2008). Predictors of answer quality in online Q A sites. In CHI '08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. NY: ACM. pp. 865-874,

Hitwise (March 19, 2008). U.S. Visits to Question and Answer Websites Increased 118 Percent Year-over-Year #8232;Yahoo! Answers receives 74 percent of all U.S. visits. Retrieved January 10, 2009 from http://www.hitwise.com/press-center/hitwiseHS2004/question-and-answer-websites.php

Keen, A. (2007). The cult of amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture. Doubleday/Currency, New York, NY.

O'Neil, N. (2007). Chacha, Yahoo!, and Amazon. Searcher, 15(4), 7-11.

Quantcast.com 2008. Retrieved January 10, 2009 from: http://www.quantcast.com/

Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past. Journal of American History, 93(1), 117-146.

Shachaf, P. (2009). The paradox of expertise: Is the Wikipedia Reference Desk as good as your library? Journal of Documentation 54, Retrieved on January 10, 2009 from http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~shachaf/paradox.pdf.

Shirky, C. (2008). Here comes everybody: The power of organizing without organizations. NY: Penguin Books Ltd.

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of the crowds. NY; Anchor Books.

Weinberger, D. (2007). Everything is miscellaneous: The power of the new digital disorder. NY: Henry Holt Co.

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