Are Libraries and Social Q&A Services Competing?

Jeff Pomerantz has launched an interesting conversation with his post, “Facebook Social Q&A Service Is the Death of Library Reference.” He argues that with Facebook now getting into the growing business of social Q&A services (such as ChaCha, Aardvark, etc.), libraries need to think seriously about whether reference is a core library service or perhaps a niche service. There are already a lot of comments on the post (including mine) and more on FriendFeed:

On a related note, check out Brian Mathews’ posts at the Ubiquitous Librarian regarding his experiences trying out some of these Q&A services: Course Hero and KGB.