New events are scheduled for this November!

Informational Meeting
Where: Gorgas and Wimba Room (Go to Wimba Room)
When: Wednesday, Nov. 2, 5:00-6:00pm
Description: Go over paperwork, fill out applications, review events. Discuss the goals and mission, answer questions about the organization.

Online Question-Answering: Virtual Referencing to Social Q&A and Back
Where: Gorgas and Wimba Room (Go to Wimba Room)
When: Thursday, Nov. 10, 5:00-6:30pm
Description: Dr. Chirag Shah, Rutgers University

Answering information seekers’ questions has always been one of the core functions that the libraries have provided. In the last decade we saw an explosion of these services going online as virtual referencing. On the other hand, information seekers on the Web have been increasingly using online forums and social Q&A sites, such as Yahoo! Answers and WikiAnswers. These services allow one to post natural language questions instead of keywords-based queries, and receive answers from their peers instead of a list of documents. The exponentially increased use of online question-answering, whether as virtual referencing or social Q&A, has raised several opportunities and challenges for both the patrons/information seekers and the information providers/professionals. In this talk, I will first given an overview of these services and their usage, and then discuss their impacts on research and practice related to both social Q&A and virtual referencing. I will draw examples from our extensive work with Yahoo! Answers, and also provide an overview of the ongoing and future work in this direction. Specifically, I will present hints and speculations to why expert-based Q&A services like Google Answers fail, why crowdsourced Q&A could be overall “good enough” approach, and how we could develop a hybrid model for Q&A that uses both expert-based and peer-based services.