Work tasks

Why do you ask?

13. Work tasks

Norway has a working population of 2,3 million persons. Three quarters work in the service sector and one quarter in industries and the primary sector. It is striking that people at work generate only a small amount of library questions, 5-6 percent of the total. Both learners and "people at home" - citizens in their private life - have much higher participation rates. Those few that ask, have mainly intellectual occupations:

Teacher

I am a teacher and wonder if you have "The diary of Adrian Mole" on video. We are starting a project on youth - sex and partnerships, and I remember this series as rather accurate on the mental processes of teenagers at puberty.

Translator

I am translating a book on - inter alia - fox hunting from English. It contains a number of special words and expressions. I therefore wonder whether any English books describing fox hunting have been translated into Norwegian.

Journalist

I work as a researcher on a Danish newspaper. ... In Denmark one can get Danish citizenship after three years of marriage to a Danish citizen. What about Norway?

Trader

Where on the web can I find pages about German cars? I mean car firms in Germany that present their cars on the web. I think of importing cars. <The only question from the commercial service sector>.

Property manager

I found a report in Bibsys with the title "Polar foxes in the North". ... . In the series Reports from Nordkalottrådet <Circumpolar Council> (47:1998). Since we have researchers studying polar foxes on this estate, we would like to buy the report. But were does the Circumpolar Council hide? I cannot find them in the electronic phone directory, on the web, or in encyclopedias. <The only question from the primary sector>.

Within the sphere of work, the use of reference services is also extremely uneven. Public services are represented by people employed in education and in cultural institutions. Media people also participate. But the rest of the economy - other public services, commercial services (excepting media), and the whole industrial sector are absent.

This is not surprising. Ask The Library does not target production life at all. Norwegian public libraries are strictly non-commercial. The principle of free services for the general public is a centrepiece of public library ideology. A number of public libraries in Denmark offer paid commercial services - at low and subsidized rates. Efforts to create similar services in Norway have met strong opposition from the library community.

Commercial actors are allowed to use the virtual service, but not to pay for the information. This means, in practice, that ATL cannot provide the types of information commercial firms need the most, such as details on patents, technologies, markets, competitors, commercial laws and regulations. The contrast with North American reference services is striking. About 40% of the questions to the virtual service Google Answers come from the world of work.

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