When the Crowd Isn't Wise, Trust Your Librarian

摘要

BY USING THEIR PRESENCE TO THEIR ADVANTAGE AND FACILITATING SOCIAL NETWORKS WITHIN THEIR ORGANIZATIONS, LIBRARIANS CAN REDEFINE THEIR ROLES AND ENHANCE THEIR VALUE. James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds argues that fine, funny things happen when you aggregate opinions. Maybe there's a bunch of people who, like me, aren't exactly sure whether creme bru-lee involves custard or tapioca pudding, but if we polled a million people and went with the majority opinion, we'd almost always get it right. The wisdom of crowds poses a problem for a librarian. What if people in search of information could always effortlessly tap into the collective wisdom of millions of others? Actually, this day is upon us already, isn't it? Everything on the Web is tagged for content by folks like you and me. Google and Bing and Facebook are not generating any new knowledge or analysis—they are simply aggregating and reporting the effect of all the clicking we do.