Thing 34 Is it Competition? Online Answer Sites

Because so much information is now online, today's students are less inclined to ask questions at a Reference Desk. They are so used to doing online searches that they feel confident that they can find information on their own. We all know the pitfalls of this approach with the multitude of databases many with their own unique interfaces. Lauren Pressley thinks most of the questions asked at the Reference Desk now are more technology related rather than reference. She thinks the best thing to do is focus on really good instruction. Along that line of thought, I will share a report I just read about an E-learning pilot done at the U of M. U of M Libraries offer over 100 face-to-face workshops per semester. The workshops are very popular so the Libraries launched a study and found that students were able to learn as much from an online version of the workshop as they did from the in-person version but in much less time (about 40 minutes for the online compared to a 75 minute face to face class. Here is a link to the study.

I can see a trend toward more electronic and virtual reference and other online help and I can see where some people might tend toward online questions and answers for somethings. We need to continue to educate users about information literacy so that they can get the best most accurate information when it really counts.