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By Judith Koren
 The Web's current evolutionary phase, Web 2.0, highlights user-
generated content. These days, anyone can publish anything, and
everyone shares everything. They do it partly to gain or enhance a
reputation ('Here are the coolest/most popular videos on YouTube') and
partly out of a real desire to make contact with and collaborate with
other people. For the first time ever, the scope of collaboration and
social networking is transcending geographical boundaries and aspiring
to be truly global.
Since the Web is a major artery for information, the lifeblood of our
profession, our tools and 'occupational culture' tend to evolve with
it. So we're hearing a new buzzword: collaborative search.
Truly global collaborative search - both international and universal
in reach - would be a way for all information professionals world-
wide, whether employed or independent, to discuss and help out with
the search needs of others. For our clients, end-users world-wide, it
would be a way to have access to advice, help with searches, and, if
they wanted, the paid services of any information professional. It
would involve a place where end-users and info-people could meet and
interact; and also where sub-groups could meet, such as info-people
discussing search questions between themselves. How close are we to
this concept of global collaborative search?
Not, it appears, as close as the buzz implies. As I tried to answer
this question, I found that everything out there now could be split
neatly into two types: on the one hand, services for librarians and
information professionals, and on the other, services for the end-
users. And never the twain shall meet? Let's take a look at what there
is, and then discuss what there could be.
Services for the pros
1. Mailing lists
Long before the Web was born, reference librarians virtually lived in
listservs such as BUSLIB-L, MEDLIB-L and STUMPERS-L. They were 'push'
services - they landed in your email inbox, constantly reminding you
that they were available even if nothing at the moment was of
interest. And they were great collaborative search tools - a request
for help would usually get an expert answer within a day or two. But
since the 'Net back then only served the governmental and academic
sectors, their reach, while international, was not universal.
The need for subject-focused discussion of reference questions still
exists: when I describe mailing lists to younger reference librarians,
they tend to look wistful and say, 'I could really do with something
like that.'
2. Professional associations
Join SLA or AIIP and you find a community of peers eager to help with
search problems (and anything else). They excel in collaboration, from
advice to subcontracting. They include community listservs - 'push'
search-help services. But professional associations can't reach
everyone. That's because they:
- Are aimed at specific subgroups - AIIP at independent information
professionals, SLA at 'special libraries' and corporate information
centres
- Are, for the most part, US- or Western-centric despite attempts to
reach out to a wider global community
- Charge Western-level subscription fees that put them out of reach in
many parts of the world.
3. Web communities
FreePint is perhaps the nearest we've come to date to a real global
community of information professionals. Its membership is an order of
magnitude larger than that of the professional associations. Like
them, it's got a place to ask questions -a large percentage of which
are requests for help with searches. It's got added services, like a
job bulletin board. And the FreePint Newsletter is clearly
collaborative - info pros updating other info pros.
But even though FreePint has a wide reach, it doesn't offer everything
a search community needs. It doesn't really enable outsourcing -
collaboration on projects between professionals, such as AIIP excels
at. Like the listservs and associations, it doesn't give access to
end-users or enable collaboration between them and professionals.
Services for end-users
1. Answer-type services
These are more about Web 2.0 than about search. Yahoo! Answers, for
instance, promotes itself as 'a new way to find and share information.
You can ask questions on any topic, get answers from real people, and
share your insights.' This is fun, especially since any real person
can reply, and what gives the service its warm'n'fuzzy Web 2.0 feel is
that those who reply are from the same demographic as those who ask -
they're not info pros. And the answers they supply are more opinion
than fact.
So there's a lot of sharing going on, but there isn't much finding (in
the info-pro sense of 'looking for') and if you're an information
professional, you find yourself wondering whether what's being shared
is really 'information'.
But these services indicate a felt need for help on the part of end-
users, and a willingness to use collaborative tools to get that help.
2. Expert-type services
These all have one central feature in common - they're a for-fee
service, in which the client can check out the experts' profiles but
eventually has to choose one expert and pay a fee (usually per-minute)
for a consultation. They provide a marketplace, which the
collaborative communities lack. But the Experts themselves are
competing, not collaborating; and it's sidelining the issue to call
the sale of professional services 'collaboration', let alone
collaborative search.
Information professionals are conspicuously absent from both Answers
and Experts sites. Go into Guru.com or Elance.com or pretty well any
other 'experts' service, and you find at best an 'Internet Search' (!)
category where the vast majority of the Experts are programmers/geeks.
Why? It's not because 'we don't do that type of information' - we
certainly do. Is it because we don't 'do' online help charged by the
minute? But reference librarians certainly 'do' online help, not
charged extra for at all. Would we feel more inclined to collaborate
if the service were vertical - a collaborative-search community,
rather than a general experts site?
3. Community information-sharing tools
Well, we've got wikis. They're good for collaborative content-
building; but they're not so suitable a platform for collaborative
search.
And we've got social bookmarking sites. You can search them and find
collections of bookmarks made by others. You can post your own and
find people like you. But, as in answers-type services, what's going
on here is sharing and social networking, not collaboration.
Finally, there are a few new services - perhaps in them we'll find our
Holy Grail of collaborative search?
- Mahalo <http://www.mahalo.com> is a compendium of subject resources
built by Mahalo's 'Guides' or contributors. It's collaborative in
the sense that anyone can suggest a link - but then so you can in
the ODP or Yahoo!'s directory. Isn't this simply an updated version
of a Web directory?
- Trexy <http://www.trexy.com> offers a downloadable toolbar which
records the URLs of pages you've visited after using a search
engine. This list of URLs is automatically created and uploaded to
Trexy's site, where it becomes a 'trail' for the keyword you
searched. Other people can see it; and the site co-locates the most
popular sites from all the 'trails' suggested for the same keyword,
into one list.
This is a cute idea, especially since it does give end-users something
that only info pros have had till now: an easy way to share good
resources you've found while searching. But collaboration, again, is
limited, because you can't share your knowledge of how to search, only
the URLs of sites selected from a search-results list. You can't add
comments or advice about those sites.
Where does all this leave us?
I emerged from this quick survey with a few conclusions:
- Info pros feel the need to collaborate - to get ideas for how to
approach a project; to get suggestions for good sources; and
sometimes to outsource to others
- End users feel a need for direct access to people who can answer
their questions. They love free community-type services, asking each
other, but they'll also turn to professional experts, and at least
some of them are prepared to pay for the service
- All the 'collaboration' tools I found are variants of known remedies
such as resource lists, social bookmarking and discussion groups.
They tend to address either the community of info pros, or the
community of end users. There isn't a place where endusers can
interact with search specialists (as opposed to whizkids who think
they're search experts because they dream in Java)
- End-user tools for finding information don't often involve searching
for it; and when they do, they're geared to simple searches - the
sort that don't help when you're researching a complex question
- There are no current resources for helping end-users perform complex
comprehensive searches - the kind that go beyond brief factual
replies to a defined specific question
- Services that try to be global are nonetheless Western-centric: the
non-US, non-European market is not well represented in them.
So we need GCS - Global Collaborative Search
A Web-based GCS community would support:
- Searchers collaborating with other searchers to build lists, or
'trails', of 'best resources' for a specific query, lists that are
more content-rich than what's now available - not just links but
also metadata about the resources and tips on how to use them; AND
- End-users looking for such lists - these are the ones who want to
learn how to fish (without having to choose an expert and pay in
order to ask the question); AND
- End-users looking for research services - these are the ones who
want their fish filleted on a plate with the right sauce added; AND
- End-users and info pros who want to comment on and add to the
resource lists already built and the questions already asked; AND
- A way of comparing 'trails' for the same or related questions, real-
time; AND
- A way of supplying all this as a 'push' service - sending all the
trails for a question to anyone, anywhere, or putting it in a blog
or Web page and having it continue to update itself, without
requiring you to return to the original GCS website, as more
collaborators add suggestions, comments, other queries and other
related trails of sources.
How can we do this? Do librarians and info people want to do this,
considering our absence from the experts and answers sites? What's
stopping us from reaching out to the wider community of information-
seekers? That's what we'll be discussing at the Round Table on
Collaborative Search at the upcoming London '07 Online Conference.
I believe that the main things holding us back are lack of incentive
and lack of suitable tools. So I and my colleagues have made a start
with TrailMap, a Flash search-trail visualisation that solves the last
problem in the list above. It's a packaged list of subject resources
(Trail) and associated metadata that you can send to anyone or post
online, where it continues to update itself real-time. And we've got
some ideas about all the other points too. But I've already overrun my
space in FreePint, so join us at the Online Conference for the next
instalment.
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