In the end, it's an emergent social form that rewards question-asking with attention. How is this bad for librarians? Working at reference desks, i sometimes wonder where all the people are. Mostly the job is indexical: this means, the job is to point at information. A good librarian, like any good teacher, doesn't own the information or get in its way.

Wikipedia consists mostly of people behaving like librarians. In a way, THAT is the nightmare, because we get those stupid MLS degrees in order to find decent work at a life-sustaining wage. How do you do that if it's just being offered for free? But go to an ALA convention and the panels about Wikipedia and getting one's own Wiki in motion are the most exciting: the ones where the audience is most participatory and engaged; a fun crowd. So although Wikipedia is in a way the enemy, it's an enemy we embrace. Why is this?

Mostly it's because we've long-since accepted that our work lives will change radically every five to ten years. Nothing is less stable in America than the forms and social routines through which information is transmitted, shared, stored, remembered and forgotten. When people remember differently, they forget differently, too. When information is constantly shared through emergent social forms, individual forgetting isn't so bad and at the same time competitions to be the one with the right information aren't quite so compelling. The most insidious social crisis of the near future is this: that schools will be used to sort our children into success and failure tracks, and the ease of movement between tracks that has defined America as a culture of second chances will disappear. At the very moment when information technology is building hive minds and distributed creativity, the economy of control and scarcity is pushing in the other direction.

Free markets produce profit at points of inefficiency: Adam Smith noted that a really efficient market is one that reduces profit to zero by commoditizing everything and producing a universal race to the bottom. Free markets are, thus, inevitably nobbled by their participants as human beings seek niches in which they can survive. that's how a free market in information works, exactly. That's why the swarm of information that you see in Yahoo Answers is so rich in misinformation. It isn't just that there's a bit of Cliff Claven in all of us: it's more that we recognize an environment rich in error as one in which we can continue to live and breathe.

Librarians have conflicted loyalties in this situation. On the one hand, we live to serve information, which needs to be accurate and have a clear source of authority. On the other hand we know as a matter of daily experience that information is organic to the social body: that it changes dynamically as that body lives and breathes, and so we are caught between clarity and regularity, and vitality and change. Everybody's caught there, really, but we can't escape knowing it.

This sounds more abstract and theoretical than it is. The networking software that rewards question-asking is good for us, because there's nothing better than to be asked a question: it's the point at which everything we do for people begins. At the same time, the goal of question-asking is not just to get pointed at resources and left to your own devices: it's also engagement in a social world, and librarians have to adjust to that both by becoming more social and by making their institutions more socially accessible. We're used to technological challenges -- mostly we're used to having to learn new software and machines. But now the technology is forcing something quite different on us: a challenge to the social forms with which we've grown comfortable, and that might be the nightmare, but it also might make life more exciting for the cardigan set -- at least, that's what I'm hoping.

Saying that this is a librarian's nightmare isn't giving the whole story. As a soon-to-be librarian (MLS in May), I can tell you that I think things like Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers and the like are not inherently a problem from the perspective of many librarians. These are a great way to harness the knowledge of people who don't make it into our traditional reference sources.

Heck, most of the (future and current) librarians I know use Wikipedia all the time. The thing is, we know that Wikipedia is not the end-all, be-all of knowledge. If I find something in Wikipedia that I really need to know (say for a paper), I'll verify it elsewhere. But it sure is convenient to have Wikipedia there to point me in the right direction. Yahoo! Answers is particularly cool in that it lets you phrase a question in plain language, something most library-sponsored resources wont let you do yet.

The problem is that not everyone knows do this critical thinking about information sources. There are plenty of college students who think that any source they find on the internet (including Yahoo! Answers or Wikipedia) is valid. And they sometimes cite them in papers. Librarians at my university do a lot of work to instruct students in evaluation of information instead of just accepting it at face value.

I hope the title of this article wont lead people to think that librarians hate these sort of online activities. Take a look at the myriad of library or librarian blogs and you'll see that librarians are taking advantage of Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, Google, and all sorts of other "non-library" tools. We just want people to think a little bit before they take John Doe's answer on Yahoo! Answers as utterly true.