Librarians give the best answers according to Yahoo! Answers
BIRMINGHAM, UK, 08 April 2009—Proof, if ever proof were needed, that libraries should be the first port of call when your general knowledge lets you down, came today from the Yahoo! Answers service. For the last sixteen months, Yahoo! Answers (UK and Ireland) have been working in partnership with the Enquire service, a 24/7 online reference service staffed by librarians. It emerged today that Enquire consistently achieves a best answers rating of 77%, making it one of Yahoo! Answers' leading Knowledge Partners.
Run by public librarians, Enquire is a free, 24-hour, enquiry service that gives users a chance to interact directly with a librarian through the medium of online chat. In 2008, Enquire became a Knowledge Partner for the Yahoo! Answers service, and scores consistently the "Best Answer" as judged by the questioners themselves. And the questions that librarians are called upon to answer are far from straightforward. They range from the unlikely: "Does anyone know how to get in touch with Jason Donavan's Management?" and "Does Francis Rossi of Status Quo have Italian heritage?" to the esoteric "How many political parties did Mongolia have in 1924?"
Commenting on Enquire, Martin Clark, Yahoo! UK and Ireland Answers Community Manager explains: "I'm delighted to have Enquire as a contributor to our site. At the time of writing they have a staggering 77% Best Answer ratio - meaning 77% of the time the users or the community think their answer is higher quality, more engaging and adds more value to them than all the other answers given. Trust me when I say this is a massive achievement for Enquire and currently makes them one of the leading UK and Ireland Yahoo! Answers contributors."
Martin continues: "The quality of the answers provided reflects to our 7 million UK and Ireland users that they are a leading expert in the reference field, with a vast repository of knowledge in libraries available at their fingertips to share with the Answers online community. This gift of experience and knowledge is invaluable to the Answers community, as the exceptional 77% Best Answer ratio proves!"
Susan McGlamery, Global Product Manager for OCLC, the organisation that manages the service on behaof of the 87 public library authorities that participate in Enquire said: "It is wonderful that Enquire has received this endorsement. But it is the librarians that staff the service that should receive the praise. Too often we forget that we have this wonderful resource called libraries at our disposal to help us, with staff that are trained to deal with our reference enquiries."
Enquire's presence on Yahoo! Answers has raised awareness of library expertise and has encouraged users to as a librarian in the first instance for answers. It also provides an alternative to the many commercial text-based question and answer services currently in operation. As smart phone and mobile internet access become more prolific, so will the opportunity for people to use the Enquire service for free at any time of the day or night.
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