Congratulations to Ask Jeeves on hiring Gary Price, long-time writer for Search Engine Watch and creator ofResourceShelf. From the press release, his title will be Director of Online Information Resources. That’s a pretty vague title for a search company, but apparently he “will lead Ask Jeeves’ outreach efforts within the library and education communities and will play an advisory role in the development of new search products for Ask Jeeves.” Cool!
In his own words:
“I’ve been asked (no pun intended) to do several things including:
1) Outreach to the library and education communities
++ This means a lot of things including doing what I’ve been doing (training, conference presentations, etc.).
++ Working closely with leaders of both communities to make Ask Jeeves a product that librarians and educators can count on.
++ A conduit (a person on the “inside” if you prefer) for these communities and from companies who serve these markets to share their ideas and services. What can we do better? How can we improve and meet your needs? We’re here to listen. Perhaps a service that librarians would find useful is already out there and we can work to bring the two sides together. It would be exciting to leverage what librarians and libraries already offer and make them more readily accessible to the public on AJ.”
It’s great to see librarians continue to be hired by search companies and I’ll be curious to see what comes of this hire.
