Legal Research

Trust and Libraries

I recall reading number of reports that show that libraries are among the most trusted institutions in society. You can imagine the ones that are not, trusted I mean.

I was interested in this editorial prediction:

The coming trust crisis in the social media expert space

This seems an argument for libraries doing great (and trustworthy) things with social media.

I know a number of libraries will friend any library cardholder but not others. Is this a way to maintain trust through identity management?

Trust is becoming a big issue in the news lately. For example, the latest news from Wikipedia is on this vein too:

Wikipedia to Color Code Untrustworthy Text

"Starting this fall, you?ll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called ?WikiTrust? will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page."

Do you think colour-coding text will make an online source as trustworthy as libraries?

Are we promoting and exploiting the position of libraries as neutral, non-partisan and trustworthy sources?

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on September 02, 2009 (boomark / email).