As librarians, we know we’re better than Google at providng relevant information—it's just that we're rarely as fast. At the “Competing with Search Engines:Rethinking Websites and Social Media Strategies” Saturday morning, NewsTrust.net executive director Fabrice Florin described a technological platform that allows his group to quickly and efficiently intermediate between producers and consumers.
NewsTrust.net is a news aggregation site with a community-sourced rating layer that filters news for its authority and balance, so that the best news from the best sources is presented to end users. The idea is simple: Let real people jury and rate content so that end users get only the best news. “When citizens and journalists collaborate,” Florin told the audience, “everyone wins.”
While libraries have been rating and reviewing content manually forever, what makes NewsTrust stand out among library reference services is the infrastructure: a technology platform that lowers the typical barriers of time and staff resources required to intermediate between information sources and patrons.
The site also makes it possible to push out content to social media points, and the community of users can share relevant information among each other because of user-profile data associated with each account.
It’s no stretch to say that this kind of architecture could be easily adapted to increase efficiency in the ways libraries deliver content to patrons. The NewsTrust platform makes it easy to let a community of users aggregate, rate, and push out content, providing a model that librarians could effectively borrow and implement in their own environments. Most of the technology that makes an infrastructure like NewsTrust possible is pretty easy to come by, with a platform like Drupal, for example. And according to Florin, the resources to maintain NewsTrust are fairly light. “A small staff choreographs this,” he said.
