Page 245 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

244 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

research purposes.
Findings of this research include: 1) on the view of differentiation of Information World of
Individuals, a clear informational rich and poor hierarchy exists among Chinese citizens. 2)
The Individual Information World of library users is better than that of the average people as
follows: on the dimension of information assert, intelligence sophistication, dynamics and time,
the information rich among library users are precede their counterpart in common staff; on the
dimension of basic information source, information asserts, dynamics, intelligence sophistication
and time, the information poor among library users are precede their counterpart ；on the
dimension of information asserts, intelligence sophistication and time, the intermediate people
among library users in the information divide precede their counterpart.
The limitations of this research are that we focused on the comparison of the information
richness between users of public libraries and common people. It is necessary to test the causal
relationship between the use of library and the information richness of people at various levels in
the future.
The practical implications are as follows. The findings of this research are not only helpful for
the assessment of the social benefits of library profession from a new perspective, but also had
some practical enlightenment for librarians in two aspects. Firstly, it is necessary to enhance the
construction of the hardware and equipments for libraries to make the public information service
system to operate more smoothly. Secondly, professional library services should not halt at the
arrangement of information resources and their use, but also need to expand their services to the
deep participation of the cognitive process (such as learning, teaching activities and so on) of users.
In this way, professional library services can improve its interventional efficiency for information
divide among people at various levels.
Present study operationalizes the concept of information divide into the rich or poor of the
Information World of Individuals. Thus, we provide a totally new perspective to assess the value of
professional public information service and its efficiency.

The construction of answer quality evaluation index for social search: An
empirical study on social Q&A system
1 ∗
Xiaoning SUN, Yuxiang ZHAO & Qinghua ZHU

SQA (Social Question and Answering) is one of the typical applications of social search in Web
2.0 era. SQA sites take advantage of the wisdom of crowds and produce a mass of questions and
answers every day. In a new generation of Internet UGC (User-Generated Content) environment,
SQA has a profound effect on the way of information seeking by users. To better understand the

* Correspondence should be addressed to Yuxiang ZHAO, Email: yxzhao@vip.163.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-9281-3030