Congrats to the ChaCha team on receiving $10 million in funding; 156 New Books Available from Illinois Harvest/Open Content Alliance; Live Search Now Summarizing Reviews for Live Search Now Summarizing Reviews for Computers and Electronics
At the same time, it would be great to see some form of "team effort" between various virtual reference services. What that precisely means would need to be discussed.
It's rather sad (or is it just us?) that people are potentially paying for services that they can likely get at no charge (quality between fee and free services needs to be measured)) from professional librarians from services like AskNow, MassAnswers, and Q&ANJ (to name just a few), often powered by OCLC's QuestionPoint. While serices like ChaCha have every right to exist, flourish and succeed, it would be good to see various services working together at least to cross-promote the concept. Of course, since ChaCha is fee-based, would they even be interested in doing this.
People can't use what they don't know about
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Similar to remotely accessible databases, more and more services confuse potential users and as we mentioned earlier, in many cases some services have end-users paying money for services they can get at no charge or being told to ask a librarian. Libraries also offer email and telephone reference and often the ability to work with a subject expert. For example, look at the Library of Congress "Ask a Librarian" service.
ChaCha has done a very impressive job to get press attention. What have they done that one doesn't see with library-based services?
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