|
Print version, chapters 8-18. For part I, see ch.
1-7. Why do you ask?
|
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Learning
Work |
Daily life
|
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.
|
Context
|
Percent
|
Relative
rates |
| Learning |
40%
|
410
|
|
Pupils
|
32
|
650
|
|
Students
|
8
|
260
|
| Daily life |
51%
|
100
|
|
Interests
|
48 |
...
|
|
Problems
|
3
|
|
| Work |
6%
|
15
|
| Not classified |
1%
|
...
|
| Sum |
100%
|
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:
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.
|
Pupil
|
Student
|
Citizen
|
Worker
|
All groups
|
|
| Topical questions |
96%
|
87%
|
55%
|
46%
|
71%
|
| Document questions |
2
|
13
|
28
|
42
|
19
|
| Factual questions |
1
|
0
|
18
|
13
|
11
|
| Sum |
99%
|
100%
|
101%
|
101%
|
101%
|
| N |
163
|
39
|
265
|
24
|
491
|
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.
School work generates topical questions. Nineteen out of twenty questions concern specific subjects. The demand is primarily directed towards literary, cultural and social topics. More than a third of the questions relate to fiction writers and their works. Another fifty percent concern society, history and culture. Only 14% deal with science, technology or data.
The literary curriculum is intensely Norwegian. Ninety percent of the fifty named authors are Norwegian. Only a handful of foreigners are admitted to the canon. We find three great writers for children and young people: J.R.R. Tolkien (Great Britain), Astrid Lindgren (Sweden), and ever popular Roald Dahl - Norwegians consider him half native.
We also meet two not-so-famous names: horror writer Kate William and Toeckey Jones, who writes in several genres. Tolkien, Lindgren and Dahl are typical teacher choices. William and Jones have probably been chosen by the pupils themselves. Toeckey Jones, by the way, is the pen-name of creative writing teacher Todd Kingsley-Jones.
The strong position of Norwegian literature among the cultural subjects has a simple explanation. The great number of questions simply reflects the great weight given to Norwegian language and literature within the school curriculum.
Once we leace the world of fiction, the outside world is much more present. The names pupils mention include, in fact, only one Norwegian. During the Second World War, Wanda Hjort Heger collected information on Norwegian prisoners in German prison camps, which saved many lives during the chaotic collapse of Germany in 1945. The full portrait gallery, ordered by year of birth, contains 13 persons (Table N).
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
Public libraries tend to be more comfortable with literature and culture than with technology and science. Librarians are usually great readers of fiction. They may be interested in other narrative genres, like biography and history. But it is rare to find library staff with a similar commitment to the literature of science and technology. They take James Cook, Georges de la Tour and the prophet Samuel in their stride. But questions on ball lightning, LAN networks or glasses and ceramics cause apprehension, Culture is close to their hearts. Science is foreign and outside.
This is not a question of universality versus specialization. Librarians can have a broad cultural background without reading the research literature in narratology, structural linguistics or Elizabethan studies. Issues, findings and disputes soon percolate into more accessible media. People who never read a research report are still culturally aware.
Librarians could, in the same way, build a broad understanding of science without reading the technical literature. Magazines like The New Scientist - or Norway`s Apollon, and a string of excellent books on popular science, have presented the newest results and debates in accessible form for decades. Authors like cosmologist Stephen Hawking, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter write for the public as well as for their peers. There is no external barrier to scientific awareness. It is the mind set that gets in the way.
|
Hours
|
Questions
|
Rates
|
|
| Science, technology and data |
29%
|
14%
|
0.5
|
| Literature, culture and society |
71
|
86
|
1.2
|
| SUM |
100%
|
100%
|
...
|
|
of which Norwegian
|
30%
|
37%
|
1.2
|
Source: Questions - Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02. Hours = Hours in Upper primary (grades 8-10) and in Secondary school (based on subjects required for access to higher education). Rates = Questions/Hours (percentages).
The "volume of trade" in scientific questions is low. The reason lies partly on the demand side. Schools spend fewer hours on, and require fewer projects in, scientific subjects. The distribution of hours between culture and science subjects is about 70 : 30 in the upper grades (8-10) of primary school. It is the same for the compulsory subjects in secondary school.
But the distribution of questions does not correspond to the number of school hours, however (Table O). Science, technology and data contribute 14% rather than 29% of the questions. If a certain number of teaching hours generates 120 culture questions, it would only produce 50 science questions. When pupils contact the service, science subjects are strongly underrepresented. As a consequence, cultural subjects are slightly overrepresented.
Our data do not allow us to go further. We know that science subjects generate fewer questions per school hour. But the causes escape us.
Teachers and librarians, demand and supply, are both involved in the learning process in libraries. To understand the role of the schools we must look more closely at the classrooms. Do science teachers encourage problem-based learning? To understand the role of the libraries we must look more closely at the responses. Do librarians encourage science-based questions? Are libraries less oriented towards science subjects. Are collections and reference skills weaker in the scientific than in the cultural area? We do not know.
In this article we study questions, not answers. A preliminary survey (Høivik, 2002) suggests that responses to STD questions are less confident than responses in the field of literature, culture and society. Public libraries are certainly cultural institutions. But they may be cultural in a narrow sense: strong on humanistic and weak on scientific culture.
The school questions are ordinary. Public libraries are not invaded by hordes of budding geniuses. Typical school assignments generate manageable questions:
The queries repeat themselves from year to year, and are largely the same throughout the country. The elementary steps in central school subjects are similar wherever you live. There is no royal road to mathematics and no Norwegian road to modern languages. Since the subjects are uniform, and the user groups large, it is possible to create standard information resources on the web.
This will happen soon. The demand for educational sources on the web is permanent, strong and predictable. The question is not when, but who? The technology is in place. But who will deliver and how will they be paid?
Will our public libraries join forces and provide school-oriented portals. Will the teachers - and they are many - organize such services? Or will commercial firms - in publishing, media or private education - manage to find business models that make school-oriented reference a viable proposition?
Student demand raises more tricky issues. The questions are obviously more difficult. But they are also more dispersed. They cover a wide range of subjects, some of them higly specialized. Students ask for time-consuming details. Since the total volume is low - a question a day, on the average - it is difficult for the staff to build up expertise. Questions come in at random, from all directions:
Nearly all students are associated with an institution of higher education. They are supposed to get their library services from their own university or college. When they use the public library system instead, they are stretching the rules.
Do you have any text books for the study of medicine?
Why do students avoid their own libraries? Cases differ. Some public libraries are less restrictive than academic libraries. They will lend books that otherwise could only be consulted on the spot. Competition from other students for the same resources is less intense. The reference service may be better. And most important: distance education creates a need for local access and virtual services.
The two systems should probably cooperate much more closely. In the future, they probably will. The subject-oriented education and research libraries could use the fine-grained network of public libraries as a delivery system. The public libraries could use the academic specialists as a second-line resource for difficult questions.
I am looking for sources about environmental education in primary school ... - this includes everything from literature that tells what environmental education is or how it should be done, to guidelines (if such exist) from the Ministry of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs.
The libraries will normally try to do their best: librarians are trained to say yes. But the basic situation remains the same: questions from students must as a rule be handled by campus libraries. The queries that arrive at reference desks in public libraries represent a spillover phenomenon. The public library system cannot - on a large scale - compensate for weaknesses in the academic library system.
All imaginable statistics on artisans in Oslo (or Norway). For instance the number of licensed artisans by category, income, etc., etc.
We have seen that a VRD designed for the general public works quite well for primary and secondary education. Pupils ask many questions. But these are simple, repetitive queries that librarians are well trained to handle. Student questions are much more demanding.
The six queries used as examples in this section were taken at random from the topical student questions in our sample. Providing good answers to such questions take time. Ask The Library can cope with the occasional visitor. But if students should start frequenting the service, the staff would soon be swamped. A broad-based service for the general public is not well suited for the detailed, time-consuming and unpredictable queries that students in higher education pose.
When customers want to identify, consult or borrow a specified document, we speak of document questions. Such questions constitute a substantial part of the reference work inside libraries. But since the users describe a document rather than an issue, it is often hard to know why they want this particular text. We therefore present the document questions separately.
The demand for documents is an interesting phenomenon in its own right. We learn much about reading patterns and the role of public libraries by studying the composition of loans. But reference data are not ideal for this purpose. Reference desks deal with exceptions: the document requests that cannot - for some reason - be handled by the ordinary delivery system. We get a more realistic picture of the demand for documents by looking at actual loans.
In the document category we find one large and very clear-cut subgroup. People are constantly trying to locate texts that are too short to be registered as books: poems and songs, in particular, but also quotations, essays, short stories and the like:
The demand for information on poems and songs has traditionally been strong. More than one tenth of all questions from daily life fall in this category. As a response, Oslo Public Library has created an extensive database of Norwegian poetry collections with information on the titles and first lines of poems. The poetry database is an important national resource and is available on the web, free of charge.
But a database of Norwegian poetry gives only partial protection. The flow of questions on international poetry and on popular music is increasing:
In the future, structured databases will be less important. The web has already revolutionized the search for quotations. A standard phrase search will identify nearly any popular quote. A test of "When I consider everything that grows" in Google on July 29, 2002 gave 160 hits. None in Spanish, though ...
Today`s web searches are, however, mostly focused on matching strings of characters. Widespread use of XML will allow web searches within specified document types (musical notes, bibliographies, time tables) and on specific components of texts (titles, notes, graphs). As the web becomes more powerful, only beginners, lazybones and people in despair will turn to libraries.
Our sample contains just a single "quotation query":
The quote is widespread. Several web writers give John Ferrier as the author - but with no documentation. You find it on the back of a T-shirt from the Good works Co.: "Feel good wearing good stuff". This is a typical management meme - of the mushy kind.
We find the same pattern with regard to books. Users of virtual services are computer literate by definition. Normal bibliographic information on ordinary books is widely available on the web. In the Protestant North, self-reliance is a virtue. It also reduces the strain on the reference service. ATL patrons are, in fact, asked to consult the on-line catalogue of Oslo Public Library before they submit bibliographical questions.
Some unnecessary questions still arrive. But in most cases patrons are facing real difficulties:
Document retrieval is the core technology of libraries. Libraries try to make the retrieval systems accessible to normal users. Increasingly, they succeed. With data literate users and better OPACs, the most elementary questions can be avoided. The document queries in our sample largely stem from situations where routine means of retrieval fail.
But library managers should take a more strategic view. Reference resources, library staff and library users constitute a dynamic system. Public reference is a free service, but it functions like a market. Questions that recur point the way to possible improvements in the system of supply.
In our material there are frequent questions about adaptations ("the novel behind the film"), about translations from and into Norwegian, and about popular series: The wheel of time (Robert Howard), The Lammas trilogy (Julian-Jay Savarin), The Road to Jerusalem (Jan Guillou), and Earth`s Children (Jean M. Auel), to mention the international ones.
When aggregate demand is big enough, it is more economical to provide such information on the web than to retrieve it on an ad hoc basis. Web resources are essentially collective goods: serve one, serve all.
But libraries can only realize collective savings if they collaborate on their web investments. The web is a great equalizer, but it requires new quality standards, new mind sets, and new ways of organizing reference work. On the web, usability - or ease of access - becomes much more important than inside each library. If libraries build strong databases with weak interfaces they simply create more work for the reference staff.
About half the questions come from people in their private capacity. They are not at school, at university or at work, but in their homes. They are pursuing their personal interests or coping with their personal problems.
We note immediately that the number of problem-oriented questions is small. About 17% of the personal inquiries deal with issues people are, in some way, forced to confront. We add that "problem" covers both small and big issues, from appropriate quotations for anniversary speeches to the perennial death and taxes.
Most of the transactions relate to questions, issues and activities people have chosen to engage with. Our personal queries reflect freedom and choice rather than necessity or coercion.
We sum up the distribution of interest questions in Table T. Document questions are not included.
SUM: 100% (N = 128)
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
The citizen topics are much more diverse than the educational ones. The biggest single interest is genealogy and local history, with nearly one quarter of all topical questions. This is evidently a category that suits the profile of public libraries. The questions range from the difficult to the impossible:
Where can I find information about the clerical family Cold, from the 1700s. Sara Cold was married to the vicar in Selje (Peder Harboe Frimann) in the middle 1700s. She came from the east.
Public libraries are expected to build up special collections devoted to their local community and to collaborate closely with local archives and museums. Within each municipality, they are unique repositories of local information.
Public libraries are also an important resource for hobbyists that seek practical advice and information on procedures and techniques. Nearly one third of the topical questions are related to specific hobbies or leisure activities (Table P). The range of activities is large. Travel information is the biggest subgroup.
|
|
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
Though the range is large, hobbies are mostly predictable. The actual pattern of questions will differ between communities. We expect questions on Bonsai and ballet to be more frequent in urban areas - while cabins and compasses point to the great outdoors. But the activities are basically familiar. Libraries are primed for such questions. We can build collections in advance. We may not be practitioners ourselves, but we know how to find the relevant books and locate the relevant experts.
The remaining queries we place in two wide categories: questions about society, culture and literature, on the one hand, and questions about science and technology (including data), on the other. People are curious - but what are Norwegians curious about? In Table Q we show the topics and in Table S we show the facts people ask about in our sample.
Norwegian focus |
Global focus |
|
|
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
The questions in Table Q are quite manageable. We note that about half the "cultural" questions have a national flavour. The resources and skills needed to answer them are concentrated in Norway. Librarians abroad would probably find many of them quite time consuming
The international questions could be handled anywhere. Most of them relate to specific countries or regions - the United States, Cuba, Mongolia, Arabia, etc. - but they are quite general in nature. The really demanding questions - ancient methods of disinfection, the forgotten author Morten Korch, dolphin poems for 8 year olds and apron fiction (how specialized can you get?) - are all Norwegian.
Many factual questions concern trivia. The person who asks for the missing letters in XLEGFXXD, and provides "mistress" as a clue, is not engaged in cryptography, social linguistics or gender studies, but in crossword solving. He or she is not searching for knowledge, which is something that coheres, but for an isolated fact.
Norwegian focus |
Global focus |
|
|
Words and expressions (16 questions)
Trivial pursuit (12 questions)
|
|
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
Libraries get a fair number of such questions. And some librarians will answer them, if they have time. In our case, I have placed crossword questions and similar queries in a separate category named trivial pursuit. The trivia questions mostly stem from recreational puzzles and competitions. A few are also the result of heated discussions or restless minds.
If we look at the quest for social and cultural facts, the biggest well-defined subgroup is words and expressions, with 16 questions. Trivia comes next, with 12. The other social questions consist of 6 with a Norwegian and 8 with an international slant.
The science queries are not very specialised either. There were questions about planets, pepper and forest birds, but not about Martian tectonics, piperidines or black elm disease. The questions had no local or Norwegian connection: nothing about Cambrian strata in the Oslo region or salmon rivers on the West Coast. This range of general questions could have been answered equally well by librarians or science reference desks in Sweden, Denmark or the United States.
* The theory that the Mediterranean broke through the Bosporus barrier into the Black Sea depression ten thousand years ago ...
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
If problems can be solved through information, libraries are problem-solvers. They have, at least, a potential.
In our case, less than a fifth of the citizen questions relate to problems that emerge in people`s daily lives. Tasks in connection with hobbies are discussed above. Here we are concerned with difficulties that are pushed upon us rather than the challenges we choose for ourselves (Table T).
SUM: 100% (N=23) |
Source: Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
In our 10% sample only four of the inquiries deal, in some way, with mental or physical health:
This corresponds to approximately 25 medical questions a year for ATL as a whole. Which is not much. Medicine and health is an area of heavy competition. In the medical sector we find the biggest and most expansive answering services on the web. Public libraries can hardly compete with Dr. Online, which is organized as an international corporation, draws on the expertise of 150 doctors, and responds to 30 thousand questions a year.
Another four are of a legal nature. Both medical and legal questions are hard to handle for libraries. Customers are not interested in general rules, but in specific answers - how does this apply to me? They do not want stacks of books but practical assistance.
Librarians are not competent to provide medical or legal advice. But they are trained to retrieve and evaluate printed materials in all professional fields. How far can or should they go in selecting, presenting and suggesting documents?
The remaining questions are less problematic. But they do suggest that libraries play only a marginal role in problem-solving.
There are five questions about occupational choice - three aspiring writers, one nurse and one sprinter. There are five social rituals - three festive speeches, one thank-you note, and one proposition of marriage. The final five span a wide range: air cargo, finding Norwegian language courses, subscribing to a French magazine, choosing the right clothes for a sixties party and a severe attack from ants:
Having access to such a service is clearly useful and convenient. Occupational advisors may be better equipped to handle the first group of questions. But the librarian is - faute de mieux - our only social advisor. And who else will tackle flying cars, forgotten styles and furious wood-eating ants?
But nice-to-have is not the same as necessary. In the virtual case the problem-solving role is weak.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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>.
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.
Ask 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:
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.
|
Percentages
|
Relative rates
|
|||
|
User
context |
OPL
|
ATL
|
OPL
|
ATL
|
| Learning |
39%
|
40%
|
400
|
410
|
|
Pupils |
21
|
32
|
670
|
650
|
|
Students |
18
|
8
|
270
|
260
|
| Daily life |
55%
|
51%
|
100
|
100
|
|
Interest
|
46
|
48 |
...
|
|
|
Problem
|
9
|
3
|
||
| Work |
6%
|
6%
|
13
|
15
|
| Not classified |
0%
|
1%
|
...
|
|
| Sum |
100%
|
100%
|
||
| N |
204
|
491
|
||
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.
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.
|
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.
Google is the most successful search site in the world. It is fast, precise and sophisticated. Most users dislike commercials, and Google has kept its interface simple and user-friendly. Google is slowly adding new services - and Google Answers (GA) - a virtual reference desk, is the most recent.
Google Answers is a virtual reference service where people indicate how much they will pay for satisfactory answers to their questions. Google refers the questions to a network of volunteer experts, who receive 75% of the money. To become a Google expert, you must send an application and indicate your skills. The users rate the quality of the answers, and "experts" that fail too often are dropped from the network.
We would call GA semi- rather than fully commercial because the sums involved are moderate - prices start at USD 2.50, because the questions tend to be quite difficult, and because the answers are detailed and involve lots of work.
Seen as a regular job, the rate of pay for a Google expert would be low. But since the whole process is transparent, personal interest and prestige is probably part of the benefit. On the open web, the experts use nick-names. But otherwise their successes and failures are visible to the world.
Google Answers is a new service. It started in April 2002, and will certainly need a couple of years to become widely known and fully established. In the summer 2002, traffic was around 60 questions a day. What we see today, is an experimental version. Formally speaking, it still in beta. But the archive already contains more than four thousand questions and answers - more than enough for studies of the content.
|
Google Answers
|
Ask The Library
|
|
| Learning |
5%
|
40%
|
|
school |
0 |
32 |
|
students |
5 |
8 |
| Daily life |
49%
|
51%
|
|
interests |
38 |
48 |
|
problems |
11 |
3 |
| Work |
41%
|
6%
|
| Not classified |
4%
|
1%
|
|
100% |
100 |
Source: Google. One hundred questions from the period July 17-19, 2002. Ask The Library 10% sample Jan 00-May 02.
The pattern of demand at GA differs a lot from the Scandinavian services. Questions from working life are a major component, while questions from schools and colleges are rare. The difference is also one of language and attitude:
Hello, this isnt really a question but merely a request that you MAY - be able to help me with..... - I'm looking for a listing of company's that I can contact that will be- able to provide me with cotton thread (as in sewing) that is silk - finished. I need commercial producers that are able to provide me - with large amounts of this thread. I'm not interested in some HICK - sewing place that can send me a few spools of thread for granny's - sewing machine. I want lots and lots of thread, like 3000m of thread.- - So I want from you guys, a list of commercial thread producers that - carry large quantities of cotton (silk finished) thread. The bigger - the list of contacts the better. Contact me at: xxx@yyy if the ten bucks I offered is not enough, I need answers soon!!!!
Google Answers classifies all questions into ten major and 78 smaller categories. The percentage distribution (Table X) confirms the results from Table W. The topical categories in Table X - computers, business and money, art and entertainment, etc. - do not correspond perfectly with the user situations in Table W. But most of the questions on computers, which are quite technical in nature, and nearly all questions on business and money, relate to the sphere of work.
The distribution between user groups and topics will change as GA becomes more established. Innovation processes follow typical stages. Early adopters are different from those that join the bandwagon later on.
|
|
Source: Goggle Answers. The archive contained about 4.600 questions on July 22, 2002.
The whole WWW, we might say, started as a playing ground for computer enthusiasts. In the mid-nineties, many worried articles were written about the absence of girls, women, seniors, and non-English speakers on the web. As WWW gradually became a normal part of modern life, the worries and the articles disappeared.
I suspect the same thing will happen with GA. Biologists say that ontogenesis repeats phylogenesis. When a baby grows in the womb, it repeats the evolutionary ascent from fish to primate. In the same way, the ontogenesis of a new web service repeats the phylogenesis of the web as a whole. First the nerds, and then the multitude.
It is therefore a bit early to start explaining the differences. Web based reference is still at an early stage. Different providers - libraries, publishers, educational institutions, private firms - are trying out different models of service and financing.
At the moment, GA is primarily a US undertaking. But it has clearly an international potential. Google is one of the major actors in the field of reference and information retrieval. If this particular model suceeds in North America, I expect similar initiatives in Europe.
Reference work is a professional version of an ordinary activity: to provide people with answers to their questions. On the average, we have seen, public libraries probably answer less than one question a year per inhabitant. The total number of questions in circulation must be very much higher. In a complex society we need a steady flow of responses in order to survive, manage and prosper. Each of us look for hundreds, and maybe thousands, of answers every year.
This does not mean that reference work is unimportant or meaningless. But it tells us that we cannot study libraries and their reference activities in isolation. The "answering system" - the whole cluster of institutions and practices that make answers available on an ad hoc basis - is in flux. The era of enlightenment is past. The established division of labor between publishers, libraries, government and media is crumbling. The web undermines old relationships and destroys old business models.
The service itself is not in danger. The demand for correct and rapid information can only increase. But the delivery channels and the modes of presentation will surely change. Public libraries have traditionally offered a broad reference service to the general public. The idea of universality - one size fits all - is strong.
I suspect this must change. Traditional services are threatened from two sides. Disintermediation attacks from the left. As web resources expand, interfaces develop and users become more proficient, the need for librarians to mediate between customers and systems disappears. The more information literacy, the less mediation.
Competition moves in from the right. Public libraries offer reference as a public service. Media, universities, professional associations and web portals provide answering services as part of their marketing. Reference becomes relationship marketing.
The principle of reciprocity is the foundation of social life. If I do something for you, you feel obliged to do something for me. The psychology of marketing is therefore centered on interaction. The first step is always to create a relationship between seller and buyer. When I offer answers, I invite you to interact. If you accept the invitation, you relate to me rather than to my competitor.
In a networked consumer society institutions must compete for attention. There is no shortage of goods and services. Products must be seen before they can be bought. Free answers create social obligations. They make institutions more visible and more human. The improve images and strengthen loyalties.
Libraries face the web on the left and the market on the right. Public libraries can handle a fair number of simple inquiries. But high-quality service is impossible at busy reference desks. Even if you need half an hour, you will only get 10 minutes.
Data on transaction times show that good answers to moderately difficult questions cost about 30-40 euros per inquiry. This is the real price tag on Ask The Library. The service works because traffic is limited. If it were advertised and promoted, it would drown.
Politicians want learners that are curious, self-propelled and inquisitive. They want citizens with easy access to public information. They want consumers who can compare prices and qualities. They want frictionless markets with instant and costless information. But they do not want to pay for personal intermediaries.
The traditional reference product - a free, general, drop-in type of personal service - is probably too good to last. In the long run people must learn the language of searching and not depend on librarians as translators. But who shall teach them? Librarians, I hope.
Library statistics are still marginal. The future role of libraries is undefined. Knowledge societies need knowledge institutions. But will libraries fill that need?
In the past, public libraries compensated for weaknesses in the industrial order. If the upper classes wanted to read, they furnished reading rooms in their own houses. Public libraries were designed for the masses. They offered information, culture and benign entertainment to people who could not afford to buy their reading on the market.
Today, the shortages have disappeared. The average job is an information job. The average home is a multimedia center. Books are cheap - but we read less. Leisure time is increasing - but we spend it on electronic rather than on printed media.
There is no crisis. Libraries are not under siege. Politicians will not waste political capital attacking such a small, quiet, and moderate institution. But loans and traditional reference activities are slowly declining. The concept of the public library reflects our industrial past. It does not give a solid guarantee for the future.
Libraries are strong on ideology. But rhetoric is a stop-gap measure. In the New Public Economy, concrete numbers are more important than abstract values. Unless libraries provide visible, documented and socially recognized services they will - I believe - slowly lose financial and political support.
Clear-cut concepts, meaningful indicators, systematic data collection and hard-nosed analyses are tools for survival. I do not foresee pitched battles and dramatic closures. But gradual marginalization can have the same effect. Old institutions never die - but some may fade away.
Tord Høivik 2002/08/05
Q/V = (3,391/31,848 + 3,599/32,341)/2 = 0,1089
Q/Y = 0,1089 * 1,361,000 = 148,000
The difference (between 148 and 181 thousand) is substantial.
The data sets consist of the questions we have analyzed, in the original languages: Norwegian, Swedish and English. The material has been categorized and lightly edited. Only a rudimentary effort has been made to standardize grammar and orthography.
http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/p20-537.pdf