Why do you ask?

8. The structure of demand

We have specified three main settings and five situations that generate questions (Table J). And we are ready to grapple with the empirical data. The following analysis is based on a random sample of the questions available in the Ask The Library archive. For technical reasons, the early questions (1998, 1999) are stored separately. The sample we work with comprise 10% of the questions from the beginning of 2000 till May 2002.

Table J. Settings and situations

From Table K we see that most of the questions are generated by people in their private lives and by young people in connection with their school work. The persons we define as citizens are of course largely the same individuals that we encounter at work, school or studies. We are not counting individuals as such, but persons in specific social roles.

Table K. User situations. Ask the Library, 2000-2002. Percentages and participation rates.

Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02. Group size (000s) calculated from Central Bureau of Statistics data: pupils (300), students (200), citizens (3,700), working population (2,3000). Relative rates = Number of questions/Group size, standardized so that Questions/Citizen = 100.

But the number of questions does not reveal the intensity of use. Some groups of people are frequent users, while others abstain. To find the actual differences, we must also look at the size of the groups involved. A rough calculation indicates that Norway has 200 thousand students, 300 thousand pupils old enough to use the service, a working population of 2,3 million, and about 3,7 million citizens - as potential reference users.

Rates of participation are extremely uneven. If we take citizens as the primary target group, and set their participation rate = 1, pupils and students are 6,5 and 2,6 times as active, respectively. People at work hardly use the virtual reference desk at all. The main user demand is generated, in other words, by people in two social settings:

1. pupils with assignments
2. citizens with personal interests

Students as a group use the service more frequently than people at large. But since students only constitute about 6% of the adult population, they provide a moderate proportion (8%) of the total number of questions.

Table M. User settings and type of assistance. Ask The Library 2000-2002. Percentages.

Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.

The types of information people seek varies with the setting (Table M). Learners ask topical questions. Citizen questions are distributed between topical, document and factual questions - in that order.

In the following sections we look at each setting in turn.

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