Gary Price of ask.com is like that great reference librarian you remember from childhood or with whom you used to work who *always* knows seven great answers to any question that starts with "Where would I go to look for...", and tells you which ones to try, in which order, and how they complement each other, and is always right. Except Gary and his colleagues do this for everybody on the whole web through his sites ResourceShelf and Docuticker, and for the past year through his job at Ask. Gary and I met several years ago, and we're new neighbors now, so we sat down together at a local coffee shop to catch up and to talk about his career and how he approaches his work.
There's a bit more ambient noise on this recording than usual, which means our recording levels are uneven sometimes, and I'm sorry about that. I hope you'll agree, though, that we have so much to learn from Gary about politely getting in the faces of our users to teach them what's out there and how to get the most out of it while saving them time, effort, and aggravation that it's worth listening through the noise.
Some of the many resources Gary mentions included:
- Price's List of Lists
- Intute
- the International Children's Digital Library
- Ask City
- Exalead
- WebSite-Watcher
This is one to listen to when you're sitting at your machine, or at least with a notepad nearby, because for everything listed above, he mentions at least two more resources worth your time and attention, and you'll want to try them out.
...oh!, and, I'd be remiss not to remind you that Gary just got married! Mazel tov to husband and wife, and safe travels! Stay tuned for more episodes to feature Gary and news about the latest and greatest resources on the 'net.
Find the feed at left, or just search for "library geeks" in iTunes to subscribe.
Excellent podcast
Another excellent podcast. Gary is so inspiring especially to me as a library school student coming to libraries as a second career. I have subscribed to ResourceShelf and Docuticker for a while now and I will be sure to check out the other resources and ask.com. I've missed your podcasts and am glad you are back.
Thanks!
Thanks for the kind words, Holly, and for staying tuned despite the lengthy hiatus. I'll keep doing them as time allows.
Good luck with school - and be sure to take that cataloging class. :)
Suggestion
This was a great podcast--keep it up! I'm really, really enjoying these. Makes me 90 minute commute less painful :)
I'd like to make a teensy suggestion: that the link for the MP3 of the audio be included in the post itself, for those people happening upon the individual podcasts that way. Currently, you have to subscribe to the podcasts to get any of the URLs for the individual MP3s (as far as I could tell, anyway). I also couldn't find a way to contact you privately, so please excuse this public suggestion.
Thanks!
Thanks for writing in, Sarah, and for your comments.
You're right about the suggestion, but for a weird combination of technical reasons, what I'm doing now is just easier. It only takes two clicks from a feedreader to get back to my blog and find the link at the left... far less than ideal, I know, but not something I can improve without time I don't have.
No problem about the public comments... that's what it's there for. :)
Web searching
In listening to you talking to Gary Price (and I do some of this for librarians here at the National Library of Australia) about the downfalls of ranking of search results in Google, I hope you know that Google will "sell" certain words so that when a searcher enters that word, their site pops up in the ads at the top. This is working in the US election websites so some politician's webpage comes up even if you search on his/her opponent's name. And I have long been a believer in reviewing search logs to see what users really are looking for. I was the OCLC rep for the subject cataloging of fiction (which I thought was the greatest thing since sliced bread but was judged by most as "too expensive"). One library here long before TOC data was available in machine readable form added TOCs and index words to their records. I asked them if their users liked this and they didn't know because they never looked at search logs.
I could go on, but I was a little disappointed about the test searches I did on Ask.com. A little too commercially oriented rather than user (i.e., ordinary person) interested.
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