Is slamming the boards like wobble-boarding?

Is there a role for our library in regards to answer boards? Certainly. Any activity that involves the conveyance and distillation of information is pertinent to librarians. The question though is how do we find the time and resources to do so? It would be nice for librarians to spend their time on these boards, but the library's main clients must come first. Perhaps it is an opportunity for library staff to spend some of their own time in answering these questions, but make it clear as they do so that more information can be gained by visiting the library itself (or its website). I would love to see librarians rostered to answering these questions, if we had the time to do so. Perhaps the library could even set up something like this on its own site. Not just simply talking to a librarian online, but allowing for other clients to suggest answers and material.

The questions that are asked are of course interesting in themselves. Many of the questions asked seem to be factual requests. The fact that they are asked shows that not everyone knows how to retrieve information and that not everything can be easily found on Google (yes, it means we are still relevant). I'm not sure however, of our professional capacity to answer the questions posed in the relationships section Of Yahoo Answers.

Opening up our catalogue to our clients is a fantastic idea (with some moderation). I'm a big fan. Our clients, being the end users of the material, are the ones most likely to be able to evaluate an item's usefulness. For students, largely using the same material from year to year, their own comments on collection material would undoubtedly be of use to others in the same subject areas. If we could couple these features with online item requests, we could even offer similar services to sites such as Amazon - "others who used this item also requested ...". Structured subject headings and access points are great for grouping together obviously similar items, but they don't easily allow for such lateral connections between collection items, which are often highly useful.