Confessions of a technophile

In participatory librarianship, one of the things we're trying to do is to facilitate conversations between people. That means helping people to connect with one another to engage in knowledge sharing. I recently learned about Aardvark, a company which has developed a social search product that should keep librarians awake at night.

So what is social search? According to the company's whitepaper published in March 2009:

Just like Web Search provided a revolutionary way to find web pages that have the information you're looking for, Social Search is a revolutionary way to find people who have the information you're looking for. In both cases, using sophisticated search indexing algorithms is a vast improvement over the manual process of following links or browsing directories to find what you want.

The goal of Social Search is to make the everyday activity of getting information from people you are connected to easier and more powerful. Most people rely on the human knowledge of those around them on a regular basis: when wandering over to a coworker, emailing a friend, or calling a family member, people are getting information that is personalized, timely, and trusted.

If you've studied about information seeking behavior, you will know that we often turn to the immediate folks around us or those we have identified as experts in our social networks whenever we have an information need.

Like it or not, librarians are not the first people we think about whenever we need to know something. And while librarians know where to look for answers, they aren't experts in everything. More importantly, they can only work with information (not knowledge) that resides somewhere in online some database, website, book or journal.

Aardvark addresses that shortcoming by allowing you to tap into knowledge residing in people's heads. After all, information represents just a small fraction of the total universe of knowledge. There are far more things we know as a civilization that haven't been written or published somewhere.

To connect you with people who can help you address your information need, Aardvark will aggregate your connections in various social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, as well as your IM contacts. You send in any question and the system will use a variety of algorithmic techniques to identify the expert in your social network to answer that question.

So how should librarians respond to something like this? I'd say we should identify ourselves as experts in areas we're naturally comfortable (whether it's music, technology or fashion) with and plug into these communities. Librarians, especially those working in public libraries, can no longer be a Jack of all trades if we want to provide a valuable reference service that meets the diverse needs of our users.