Why do you ask?

15. Comparison B: Norway and Sweden

Norway and Sweden have similar languages, similar cultures and similar library systems. But the countries are not identical. Ask The Library is the only large, virtual reference desk for the general public in Norway. It is financed by the central authority for public libraries, which pays for two full-time staffers, and is managed by Oslo Public Library on its own.

The corresponding Swedish service, Fråga biblioteket - which also means Ask the library - is a networked undertaking. Close to thirty libraries cooperate in running the system. The volume of traffic is somewhat smaller than in Norway - typically 7 or 8 questions a day. The Swedish VRD has a special section for children, which receives about 7 questions per month. In Table V we compare the two Swedish and the Norwegian service.

Table V. User situations. Ask the Library (Norway) and the Swedish national services. Percentages.
Sweden
general
Sweden
children
Norway
Learning
18%
36%
40%
School
9
36
32
Student
9
0
8
Daily life
72%
60%
51%
Interest
64
54

48
Problem
8
6
3
Work task
4%
1%
6%
Not classified
4%
3%
1%
Sum
100%
100%
100%
N
100
209
503

Sources: Sweden general - The one hundred most recent questions available in the archive on July 15, 2002. Sweden children - All 209 questions available in the archive on July 13, 2002. Norway - Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.

The general structure of demand is similar. Most of the questions come from citizens and concern their personal interests rather than their personal problems. The educational demand is substantial in both countries. People at work are infrequent users.

But Swedish learners use the service less than their Norwegian counterparts. The educational share of the questions is only 18% in Sweden, against 40% in Norway. In Sweden, some of the educational questions go to the children`s service, of course. But the gap remains even if we include the questions from the children`s VRD. Its volume of traffic is too low to raise the educational share by more than a couple of percentage points.

Several explanations are possible. One attractive hypothesis is stronger competition from subject-oriented answering services. In Sweden, pupils can address questions from all fields of science - including humanities - to dozens of well-run academic VRDs. The central web portal for schools - Skoldatanätet - provides a detailed listing of Swedish Ask-An-Expert-services. And the Swedish library VRD has a link to this list.

In Norway, AskA-services for schools are much less developed. And the few that exist are not listed on the web site of Ask The Library. ATL only provides links to other VRDs run by libraries. This is not a matter of policy or conscious decision - it is rather a symptom of the current distance between two social arenas: public libraries and academic science. They hardly interact or care about interaction.

But these are speculations. More empirical work is needed to substantiate or refute the conjecture.

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