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Why do you ask? 14. Comparison A: Virtual and physicalAsk The Library supports learning and leisure. The learning function is mostly homework help. Some students use the service, but within the present strucure they could never become a big user group. People in work situations rarely contact ATL. Both academic and economic demands must basically be met by other institutions. Ask The Library is a virtual reference desk that is operated by a single public library for a national audience of four million people. Many of the more specialized VRDs provide archives of questions and answers. But in Europe I know only two services that publish their complete transactions on the public web. ATL is one. The corresponding Swedish service is the other. The reference log is a rich source of information. But are the findings valid beyond the case itself? To what extent are the results relevant for other reference services - within and outside Norway? This is a big topic with limited data. Here we undertake three brief explorations, comparing ATL with:
Virtual reference: a mirror of the real world?Archived questions and answers from digital reference services give us a uniquely detailed picture of concrete reference work. But most reference work still takes place inside the physical library. Ask The Library answers approximately one out of every thousand questions that are addressed to Norwegian public libraries. Even if we add the more local e-mail services, 99.8% of all questions come through traditional channels. And we must ask: Are the virtual findings valid for physical reference work as well? This question does not have a simple response. Libraries for the general public, and libraries for specific groups, will obviously face different patterns of demand. The same must be true for virtual services with different target groups. We also know that the reference patterns differ between public libraries and between divisions and service point within a single library. Let me rephrase the question. ATL is a general purpose virtual service. So we should ask: Are the ATL findings valid for general services at the physical reference desk? The answer seems to be yes. Table U. User situations. Reference at Oslo Public Library spring 2002 compared with Ask the Library, 2000-2002. Percentages and relative participation rates.
Source: ATL - Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02. OPL - Sample of 204 questions from patrons at the reference desks in the adult section of the main office of Oslo Public Library mid-spring 2002. Music section not included. Group sizes in Oslo calculated from Central Bureau of Statistics data for pupils, for resident population and for people working in Oslo, and from Database for higher education (DBH) for students in Oslo. DBH data are incomplete, so the registered number (42 500) was increased to 50 000 in order to include some missing (private) institutions. Citizen = 15+ years. Relative rates = Number of questions/Group size, standardized so that Questions/Citizen = 100. In the spring 2002 we collected several hundred questions posed at the physical reference desks of Oslo Public Library. In Table U we compare the user contexts in the physical and the virtual case. We see that the general pattern of demand - from school, higher education, personal life and working life - is very similar. Compared with people at large, pupils and students are four times as likely to use the reference service, whether it is physical or virtual. In Oslo, almost one fifth of the "physical" questions come from students. But this is simply because Oslo has a large student population. If we take group size into account, the relative participation rates for pupils and students are basically the same in the physical and in the virtual case. |
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