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Help information regarding library resources and tools is a critical part of library services, but is often fragmented and undermaintained. There have been some efforts to create searchable help content, but adding new questions and answers, as well as validating and updating answers that may be out of date, inevitably takes up librarians’ valuable time. Moreimportantly, the traditional model of librarians passively waiting for users to seek help—while most users find help outside libraries—has not changed. Users, especially students, tend to seek reference help from faculty advisors and their peers. This kind of knowledge sharing does not have a well-structured platform within the library environment, and expert knowledge is not well utilized.

To address these needs, we developed a crowdsourcing web-based help system (CrowdAsk) for academic libraries. By definition, crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers. CrowdAsk allows users (particularly undergraduate students) to ask and answer open questions related to library resources. In both the public and library contexts, crowdsourcing has emerged as a distributed problemsolving and content production model. Existing crowdsourcing platforms, such as Stack Exchange, incentivize the user base to become involved in the project through a variety of means including gamification. Common