A poem lovely as a tree? Virtual referenced questions in Norwegian public libraries. In Johannsen, Carl Gustav and Leif Kajberg (eds.). Lanham, MA: New frontiers in library research, Scarecrow Press, pp. 43-59.

Summary

As a social institution the library mediates between those who produce and those who utilize recorded knowledge. Reference service - to give professional answers to questions from library users - has traditionally been an important library task. Information and communication technology (ICT) is changing reference work. Producers, librarians and users are caught up in a slow, but irresistible process of digitalization. Traditional practices are threatened. But ICT also creates new possibilities for organizing, studying and improving reference work. The growth of virtual reference desks (VRDs) - where e-mail is used to communicate with library patrons - represents one of these possibilities.

Our empirical data come from the main Norwegian VRD: Ask the library (ATL), which is hosted by Oslo Public Library (Deichmanske bibliotek). This is a national service which receives several thousand queries a year. Questions and answers are available on the web. I have studied a representative sample of one hundred questions and consider what they reveal about typical queries and the context in which they are generated.

Half the queries were topical - requests for materials about a topic, a subject or a field of knowledge. One third had to do with specific documents. Only one sixth were factual - requests for a specific piece of information. Questions from students in higher education and from people at work are rare. Two user groups dominate: pupils at school and people at home.

A comparison of literary and scientific questions showed that responses to literary questions were more authoritative than answers to science questions. A closer collaboration between public libraries with scientific communities and their reference portals - in the form of AskA-services - is called for.

Technology and organisation

Digital reference work

Most reference questions are asked by users who visit the library and meet the staff in person. But libraries are normally willing to answer questions that arrive by telephone, mail or fax as well. E-mail represents an additional channel. A virtual reference desk is, from this point of view, simply a formal acceptance of the electronic possibility: the library announces its willingness to receive and respond to queries by electronic mail.

Reference librarians have often dreamed about storing questions and answers, so that they could build on past experience. The obstacle is always time. Writing down queries, search strategies and responses as they occur can easily double the time needed to carry our a particular reference transaction. Our knowledge about the core of reference work - the actual content and flow of questions and answers - is therefore quite limited.

This is particularly true in public libraries, with their heavy traffic and their exceptional variety of questions. Some sample studies and ad hoc surveys are carried out as a basis for library statistics and annual reports. A certain amount of research has also been done, mainly on reference quality. But as soon as e-mail comes into play, the trickle of empirical data is transformed into a torrent. E-mail systems store the transactions automatically. Oral messages become digital files. Setting up a retrieval system is a massive operation in the world of writing, but a manageable task in the world of bits.

Introducing e-mail is a small step for a single library - but a big stride for the social institution. Data imply rather more than an improvement of existing services. ICT creates a platform for new services and new institutions. At the same time, existing services are threatened. Digital technologies are revolutionary in their impact. Put your ear to the ground and hear the continents rumble …

Fifty years ago, the card catalogue was the core technology of the library world. The transition to digital typesetting created bibliographic databases as a spin-off. Then library catalogues were automatised. Today, a card catalogue is a relict. Soon they will be museum exhibits - curious artifacts from the era of print.

Traditional reference work consists of a series of bilateral consultations. The customer presents a query which the librarian - sometimes - will clarify through an interview. The librarian - or both together - explore search tools and reference sources. The customer leaves with a specific answer or a selection of relevant materials.

Traditional reference work is opaque. Transactions are invisible to other librarians and other clients. In such closed bilateral settings quality depends on the training and the commitment of the individual librarian. They must internalize the standards in order to sustain them. In traditional libraries, systematic team work was rare. But the new technology literally invites team work. In open digital work spaces quality is reinforced through advice, feedback and a flexible division of labour. Our cubicles turn into open landscapes. The ecology of reference work is transformed.

The combination of e-mail, databases and hypertext facilitates distributed services. A web based VRD may accept questions from anywhere in Norway - or from anywhere in the world. The work load may be distributed among different partners in different localities. Partners might choose different levels of commitment. Answers may be published on the web. A comment function can easily be added - giving readers and other librarians the opportunity to supplement or correct the information provided.

In Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Great Britain the national VRDs are run as public library networks. The main Norwegian service - Spør biblioteket (Ask the library, ATL) - is operated by the Oslo Public Library - but is promoted and financed as a national service. ATL was an early initiative - operations started in October 1997. The service offers help with factual questions, references to relevant sources and assistance in finding web resources.

Oslo is somewhat overrepresented: 20% of the questions come from the capital, which has 10% of the national population. But with four fifths of the queries coming from the rest of the country, ATL is definitely a national service. The transaction volume is around four thousand questions a year - about the same as the Swedish and the British (!) services. Questions and answers are available in a web archive.

ATL is not the only VRD in Norway. By spring 2002 fifteen public libraries had established virtual reference desks. But this is a small number in a country where every single municipality (400+) has its own separate public library system. And in most cases only the first step had been taken. The fifteen libraries accept questions and provide answers, but do not offer open archives.

In addition, about thirty other institutions offered specialized reference services - like Ask a geologist - from the Norwegian Geological Survey, Ask the photographer - from Dagbladet, a major newspaper, and Ask dr. Chlorophyll, which is operated by the website House, home & garden. But such AskA-services are much more developed in Sweden and in Denmark.

The more we know, the more we ask

In a highly specialised world information must be sought in bits and pieces. Every organisation or enterprise, small or big, public or private, receives questions within its own field of activities. We expect carpenters to know about roof beams and butchers to know about beef. All collective actors - firms, voluntary organisations and public institutions - must be prepared to answer questions about their own products, services and fields of expertise. Large companies, like Statkraft, Norsk Hydro and Storebrand, have their own information divisions. The division of knowledge in society mirrors that of labour.

Providing information is an essential part of the job for most voluntary organisations. When the desire to inform - or the demand for answers - is strong, specialised agencies are set up - like the national Government Information Service, the Norwegian Church Information Service, Facts about Bread, Tine Kitchen (on dairy products) and HeatingInfo - the information office for flexible indoor heating. Norway is a cold country.

Libraries aimed at particular user groups - academic libraries, school libraries, special libraries and the National Library - also provide reference services. But they only admit relevant questions. The Norwegian National Library will only accept questions on Norway and Norwegian culture. A school library should be able to explain why the sea is salt. But you should probably go to a medical library if you want to know why your blood is salt.

Public libraries offer general rather than specialised reference services. ATL refuses to summarise books or to write project papers. They discourage competitions and crossword puzzles. But this does not restrict the range of questions they accept - only the fullness of the answers. If the library should offer what pupils and students really want: ready-made papers with guaranteed A`s - learning through doing would lose its meaning.

It is the lack of specialisation that makes public libraries special. Their reference services are freely available to the population at large. The social contract between librarians and their customers is phrased like an open invitation. People may ask about any topic - and need not give reasons why librarians should spend time and energy finding the answer. Librarians are trained to take all questions seriously - from the most trivial fact to the most resistant stumper.

The true mailman will invest hours on inscrutable Christmas cards. The true librarian will pursue a really hard question for days and weeks. Utility be damned. In these professional cultures, successful identification of trivial facts are seen as heroic feats. Persistence shall prevail.

Economy of time and reuse of data

This does not imply that all questions are answered or that all answers are satisfactory. Surveys in many countries have show that reference quality in libraries is rather low. Researchers speak about the 55%-rule: only 55 out of every hundred questions will receive fully adequate answers. But these surveys have focused on factual questions. Recent work (Richardson, 2002) show better results when the normal mix of questions is studied.

But ATL is still exceptional. More than 95% of all questions are answered. The quality of the answers is generally high, and the response is fast. Twentyfour hour service is the norm: customers normally receive an answer within the next working day.

High reference quality in physical libraries requires good access to reference resources, effective organisation of the reference service, competent reference interviewing - and time to cope with the work load. Resources, organisation and time are needed in the virtual world as well.

Time is essential. A small ad hoc survey in Oslo indicates that the average ATL question takes about 40 minutes to answer. The true time cost is higher - maybe one hour - since the staff also needs overhead time: to maintain the database system, to attend meetings, to take care of office routines, etc. From an economic point of view we must also include general overhead: buildings, utilities, supplies, support staff. This implies an average cost of at least sixty Euro, or U.S. dollars, per answer. I am therefore a bit worried by the new Google service (April 2002). At Google answers, which is a networked VRD with paid volunteers, the typical cost per answer is less than 10 dollars.

The virtual desk provides better service than reference face to face. The librarians at the public desks in the physical library can not spend 40 minutes on each patron. At the desks, the constant pressure for assistance reduces the time per patron with “serious” reference questions to about 10 minutes, on the average (Høivik, field data, March 2002).

All reference desks could provide better services if more users were more self-reliant. Virtual reference desks try to help the users help themselves in two main ways: by guiding them towards independent use of web based resources and by providing searchable databases of previous questions and answers. In Oslo, these components are still rudimentary. ATL invites customers to search for books in the library catalogue on the web. But the interface is somewhat forbidding and the help menu rather technical.

Users are also asked to search in the question-and-answer database before they e-mail their queries. But the archive is poorly developed, in Norway as in most other countries. The transactions have not been thoroughly edited and indexed. Misprints are frequent. The Norwegian language creates additional obstacles to string-based retrieval. The language comes in two official flavours and has a liberal attitude to orthography,

Librarians will manage. But reference archives will only be useful to the average user if the materials are edited and organised for reuse. The American service Ask Dr. Math is a good example of effective reuse. Questions are graded by education level and organised by mathematical subfield (algebra, geometry, calculus, …). Such knowledge processing is easier within well defined and highly structured disciplines like astronomy, mathematics, medicine and law. A similar ordering of the ordinary questions and answers that arise in daily life is far more demanding - and raises difficult issues in the areas of language processing and artificial intelligence.

The queries: what do people ask?

One hundred Norwegian questions

Nearly six thousand reference transactions had been registered in the SBI database by mid-autumn 2001. All questions are classified by Dewey (first level). Eighty percent of the questions fall in one of five “large” Dewey groups (Table). These five each catch more than ten percent of the questions. The five “small” Dewey groups contain five percent or less.

Questions to Spør biblioteket in 2000, by Dewey group
Five “large” Dewey groups	Five “small” Dewey groups
24% questions about Literature (800 group) 18% about History & geography (900) 15% about Social sciences (300) 13% about Technology (600) 12% about Arts & recreation (700)	5,0% about Computers, information, & general reference 4,6% about Science (500) 4,5% about Language (400) 3,2% about Religion (200) 2,6% about Philosophy & psychology (100)

One hundred reference questions were selected. The sample was stratified by Dewey groups: 24 questions about literature, 18 questions about history and geography, aso. The most recent entries available on September 8, 2001 were chosen.

By reference we mean queries that engage the professional competence of the librarian as such. British studies of ordinary reference desks show that many questions (30-40%) are practical or administrative in nature: When do you close? How should I fill in this form? Where is the Britannica? (England and Sumsion, 1995, p. 118). Such requests are rare, but not totally absent, in the virtual case. They are excluded from our sample.

England and Sumsion also report that librarians diverge widely in their conception of reference work. Some would include giving directions and “fetching and carrying” from closed access stacks (p. 116). For empirical and comparative studies we need comparable data. “The International Standard for Library Statistics dodges the issue” (p. 115). A Swedish study found that only 10% of the work at the reference desk required specific professional skills (Høivik, 1997, p. 54).

Fortunately, most of the virtual requests are bona fide reference questions. They do require professional the expertise of librarians. The borderline cases are much more frequent in the physical setting.

Our counting unit is the question, not the transaction as a whole. Some queries include several questions. If they address the same topic, they are counted as one question, however phrased. The following is taken as one question: Has Kristin Lavransdatter <Sigrid Undset`s novel> been translated into Arabic? Which languages have translations? But the next counts as two: I have four questions, two on garlic and two on consumer rights.

Classifying reference questions

Reference is communication. The customer questions the librarian and the librarian queries the system. Our empirical data consist of the transactions between librarians and customers. Each question is a message from a client to the library. Each answer is a message from the the library to a client. The transaction chain is minimal: one question and one answer.

In communication studies, messages may be classified and analysed in many different ways. VRDs are friendly, chatty and relatively informal. Entry barriers are low. Our questions reveal much about ordinary life and people at large. A social historian would find rich materials on needs and expectations, interests and problems, topics and trends in the Norwegian population.

Here we focus on practical management. All general reference services need mechanisms for sorting and allocating queries. Like patients entering a hospital, questions must be distributed between departments and specialists.

We distinguish three broad categories:

• Topical questions. Users require information about a a subject, theme or topic
• Factual questions. Users require factual answers to concrete and specific questions
• Document questions. Users require factual information about specific documents - usually in order to retrieve the documents

The boundaries are, of course, approximate. Who was governor (lensherre) in Bergen in 1616? is clearly a factual question. But those who wonder why the sea is salt, may need an explanation of how water moves between skies, land and ocean. The factual answer requires a topical context.

Questions about specific works are frequent. We include all questions that refer to a particular work or text, in the category document search. By works we also mean individual articles, poems, quotes, songs, musical compositions, pictures, films, aso.

Among the one hundred questions, the distribution was as follows:

• Topical questions constituted about one half of the transactions
• Document questions constituted about one third
• Factual questions constituted about one sixth

A study of one hundred reference questions at Oslo Public Library five years ago, before the virtual service opened, gave roughly the same results: topical searches - 56%; document searches - 27%; factual searches - 17% (Høivik, 2000). But we know from British studies that the relative proportions between categories may vary quite a bit between libraries (England and Sumsion, 1995, p. 118).

Topical questions: subdivisions

Norway is a fractured country. Mountains and valleys, lakes and islands, fiords and forests cut across the landscape. Public administration is equally divided. The country contains 435 municipalities, each with their own autonomous library system. Most are tiny. Only a hundred systems serve more than ten thousand inhabitants. Our public libraries have strong local roots. Each system must build its own local collection and be prepared to answer questions about local history, society and culture. Questions that deal with typically local topics, or local searches, form a meaningful subcategory. Seen from the outside, such queries look highly specialised. But the public library system is well prepared to respond through its fine-grained municipal network.

Public libraries could also be described as literary institutions. Their primary user groups are children and readers of fiction. Their general mission is to promote enlightenment (opplysning), education and other cultural activities (Law on public libraries, §1). But the activities tends to be literary and artistic rather than political, social or scientific. Parliament has given libraries a central role in promoting Norwegian fiction.

Library education attracts book lovers (80% feminine) rather than knowledge managers (either gender). The curriculum at the library school in Oslo, which had a monopoly of training till a few years ago, still encourage a humanistic approach to library and information science. This means that literary searches, or questions that deal with literary subjects, also form a meaningful subcategory. Librarians bring a particular expertise to literary topics. They are literate in the field of literature and attack questions about forgotten Norwegian poets with alacrity.

The remaining topical queries can be roughly divided into a broad and a narrow segment. Broad queries address topics that are elementary and widely known: communism and witches, calligraphy and the late sixties. An educated person will be aware of the issues. They belong to the common culture of our time. Relevant information is easily available. We can draw on a rich supply of encyclopedias, textbooks, mass-market handbooks and - increasingly - authoritative web sites.

Narrow queries deal with topics that are of interest to a few: the medical use of saffron, the programming language Simula, the colour theories of Wittgenstein. The questions could, in principle, cover the whole range of knowledge. But ATL is a general purpose service for the general public. We would be surprised to find questions about the toxicity of spirocyclic piperidines or the literary influence of Aulus Gellius in the Renaissance. Scholars who care about such issues have better ways of finding out.

Among the fifty topical questions, the overall distribution was as follows: broad queries - 44%, narrow queries - 28%; literary queries - 16%; local queries - 12%.

Factual questions

Most of our factual questions are rather simple. The service is not oriented towards advanced questions of a technical nature - except for advanced questions in the bibliographic field. The latter we classify as document queries. The 18 factual questions in our material come from four main areas: words and expressions (one third), scientific, technical and medical (one third), society and public affairs (4 questions) and history (2).

The user`s problem comes from the diversity of sources rather than from the difficulty of the question. For several hundred years, almanacs took care of broad information needs. General encyclopedias also serve the FAQ market - the questions people frequently ask. For a long time, Norwegians have been inveterate buyers of encyclopedias.

Households will stock up on their special fields of interest. Some play chess - and some plant roses. Some tinker with cars - while others go skiing. Every subject has its handbooks. But modern families can not cope with the surprises - the unexpected rarely asked questions that emerge from time to time. It takes a substantial collection of handbooks - as well as expertise in their use - to respond to the full range of questions in the 21st century. In other words: a well-stocked library with a competent staff.

The web is beginning to make a difference. Authoritative web sites, including web based encyclopedias, are already powerful reference tools. But physical access is not the same as intellectual access. We know the many library users feel lost in the physical reference collection. They are surrounded by information, but starved for answers. Factual searches on the web is both easier and more difficult than consulting reference books. Easier because we have global indexes (Google, AltaVista). More difficult because we must do the quality control ourselves.

The future, we believe, lies with more editing rather than more retrieval on the web. The general public does not need universal access. For all its diversity, the universe of relevant public knowledge is much, much smaller than the totality of recorded knowledge. This limited space - which we may call the relevant web - can to a reasonable degree be surveyed. And public libraries can play an important role as surveyors, editors and organisers.

We do need more self-reliant users. The future belongs to reference sites that combine web resources and e-mail: on the one hand well-designed portals, guides, and help functions for independent searching; on the other personal reference services based on e-mail and chatting. But the supply of portals ought to respond to a real demand. To create efficient portals to the relevant web, the library world needs to classify, count and study the questions that local communities actually ask.

Ellen-Merete Duvold (2002, p. xxx) makes a vital point when she defines the library in terms of knowledge rather than of information. Reference work has a superficial and a deep variant. In superficial reference we provide facts and documents on demand. In deep reference the library engage with the processes of learning, problem-solving, reflection, production and delight..

Document questions

Document queries are factual questions that concern the formal or external properties of documents rather than their actual content. Document questions engage the core competence of librarians and the core technology of library systems. Document retrieval is still dominated by single-media systems: one database for books, another for articles, a third for audiograms, a fourth for web sites. The student of Kant must work with four different interfaces in order to locate monographs, essays, portraits, and maps of Kønigsberg.

Users want a much more integrated approach. With time web technology will provide it. But the process is complex and slow. It takes decades rather than years. In the meantime, reference work must go on. Retrieval systems will improve, and many users will be better trained in their use. But personal assistance will be needed for a long, long time. The document universe is too large, too varied and too dynamic for most users. They may learn to tackle the merely difficult questions by themselves - but for those impossible questions they will still need reference experts.

It is hardly surprising that 75% of the document searches concern printed media. The balance beteen fiction and non-fiction was approximately 3 to 2. The document queries are factual questions that relate to specific documents. Compared with other factual questions they tend to be quite difficult. Three examples:

• Hi! I`m looking for a 78-recording of the song Mona with Sven-Olof Sandberg. It was published by Parlophon in 1931 with serial no. B41807.
• I am looking for a book for young people that appeared 30-40 years ago. It concerns a young boy who was searching for his father. I think the title was David.
• Could you tell me who wrote the following poem, and when: “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree …/Poems are made by fools like me,/But only God can make a tree.” <The poem - Joyce Kilmer`s Trees - has been translated and the quote was given in Norwegian>

Only the patient construction of vast catalogues over many years makes it possible to answer such questions successfully. The web does, however, open several new possibilities. Web indexes like Google and AltaVista are exceptionally effective in tracing obscure quotes. Through its web site, the Norwegian Central Bureau of Statistics provides excellent access to Norwegian statistics. The extremely detailed and thoroughly cross-indexed International Movie Data Base makes it possible to identify old feature films from the merest snip of information.

The customers: who are they?

Work, learning and leisure

We participate in complex, post-industrial knowledge societies. Our questions and queries come from a variety of social situations - and reflect their origin. In the project we make a distinction between three types of situations: (1) questions that emerge from working life (private or public), (2) from situations of formal learning or study (schools, colleges, universities), and (3) from the informal sphere (family, leisure, voluntary activities).

At work we are obliged to produce. Our activities are directed towards visible results. Work is shaped by necessity. Those who pay have a right to demand. Questions from work life are questions that reflect the demands of production. They are asked in the hope of solving practical problems. Answers contribute to the productive process: I work at the department of social anthropology in Trondheim, where I show documentaries. Is it possible to borrow films from your institution?

In formal learning situations we are also obliged to produce and deliver. But the work is unpaid and the products are not sold. By working on assignments, pupils and students are supposed to develop their own knowledge, skills and attitudes. Gainful employment comes later. Learning generates a different type of query: may I get information on France, e.g. on music, geography, culture, food, wine, architecture, history, books, theater, film, wine districts, famous persons?

At leisure we follow our own inclinations. We also face our individual problems. Leisure questions are much more varied and much less predictable than those which stem from work or school life.

ATL does not ask the user to supply a context. Still, most of them do. The content and phrasing of the question are also revealing. Most of the queries can, at least tentatively, be located within one of the three contexts. In my sample:

• Only a handful of questions emerge from the world of work - and these came from teachers
• About thirty questions reflect learning tasks - and only a few of these come (probably) from students in higher education.
• The remaining questions are related to family life, leisure and voluntary activities

The customers consist, in other words, of two major groups: people-at-large, outside work, and pupils working on assignments.

School questions: what do pupils ask?

Youngsters at school ask predictable questions. Very few request specific facts or documents. Teachers assign manageable subjects. We find many local, literary and broad topical questions. Typical subjects that teachers like include social institutions (monarchy, confirmation), world history (the Boer War, Tut-Ankh-Amon and the mysterious curse connected with his grave), Norwegian cultural icons (the actor Bokken Lasson), Norwegian minorities (the taming of reindeer) and the local community (crime in a particular suburb of Oslo).

Oslo Public Library has provided this service for four years. It is widely used and much appreciated by pupils all over Norway. But the field is dynamic. Last year, the main web site for Norwegian schools (skolenettet.no) unveiled its own virtual reference service. For the time being, only questions about nature from pupils in primary school are accepted. But that may change.

The school system (K-12) is approximately fifty times bigger, in terms of staff and budget, than the public library system. The schools can draw on a vast body of subject specialists among their teachers. But librarians are - potentially - much better knowledge organisers. I hope for a school oriented reference service that can combine these two strengths.

Leisure questions: what do adults ask?

Queries from everyday life are much more diverse. One client needs a do-it-yourself manual on carpentry. Another wants information about a whaling expedition - his grandfather was a shipboard cook. And what is a Columbian necktie? asks a third. The answer is too gruesome to be revealed … Still, it is easy to identify some typical categories which every public librarian will recognise. The most frequent case is the customer who needs help to trace a document - a book, an article, a quote, a poem, a song - that is hard to find. Document searches constitute about one half of all leisure questions.

Factual questions are also frequent: (1) What does the expression to be ready as as an egg mean? (2) In a hard-boiled egg, is the white stuff fat and the yellow stuff protein, or vice versa? Topical queries tend to be narrow rather than broad. (1) Do you have information about “Norwegian Association of Bus Companies”, which was established in 1914? (2) I am looking for books on how to build boat models in wood - preferably fishing boats.

The questions can obviously be ordered and classified in many different ways. But let us consider a distinction that is important for library policies. In Norway, public libraries are institutions for public enlightenment (folkeopplysning). But enlightenment has two faces - one practical and one theoretical. Should we cultivate our garden or our mind?

We distinguish between knowledge intended for use and knowledge intended for insight or enjoyment. We often seek information with an external goal in mind. We want to increase our practical skills - for instance in cooking, bridge or genealogical research. The questions have an ulterior purpose : what are the Norwegian measures that correspond to 1 lg? 1 md? 1 qt? 1 c?. Correct answers are followed by culinary action.

But we also seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We study in order to think. We read literature - both high and low - in order to be entertained, moved or matured. We explore topics that fascinate: Aphrodite, mummies or sunken ships. We meditate on the great mysteries - Death, Love and Ocean. Ripeness is all.

At the level of policy we could ask: should libraries emphasize practical assistance or the cultivation of the mind? At the level of statistics we could ask: what do people actually request? Our sample is too small to deal with this question in depth, but one aspect is treated in the next section.

VRD data are highly relevant for many other library issues. The reference logs reveal the true concerns of our users. In her paper on community information, Marianne Hummelshøj (2002, p. xxx) makes a distinction between information for survival and information for political action. Our sample includes only a few questions of the first kind - and none of the second. There are questions about political parties, but they come from pupils who are forced to ask rather than from citizens who want to act.

Between literature and science

Familiar and foreign topics

While working on the hundred questions, I also looked at the answers - and was struck by a certain difference between literary and scientific responses. The answers to literary questions revealed an easy familiarity with topics and reference tools, while the scientific answers seemed more tentative and remote. Compare the two responses below:

Where can I find the text of Mozart`s Requiem in Norwegian - preferable facing the Latin text?

On “The Requiem Web”, a personal web site, you will find the Latin text with an English translation. … The Requiem mass is still used by the Catholic church - in Norway as well - so you will find the Norwegian as well as the Latin text in the missal. … Our music section is preparing a collection of the most important liturgical Latin texts in Norwegian translation. This will be ready sometime this autumn.

I am doing a project on carbon fibres and have problems in finding information about their composition (structure, chemistry). … Could you help me with information on the web?

Hi! There was not much on the web , but you could take a look at this link - maybe it it will help …. I found a little in this book: Kofstad, Per: Uorganisk kjemi : en innføring i grunnstoffenes kjemi. <Inorganic chemistry: an introduction to the chemistry of the elements> … You should also be able to use McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of science & technology. - New York, 1992, which is available here in the library.

Both answers are helpful, but the first is much more confident than the second. In the carbon fibre case, godd web information was available (for instance on Vince Kelly`s Carbon Fibre homepage).

To explore this difference more systematically, we selected ten demanding scientific queries (Dewey group 500) - without checking the answers. For every question we picked a matching literary question (group 800) that had, in our judgment, at least the same level of difficulty. Then we compared the answers pair by pair.

In every case we found the literary answers to be qualitatively better - in some cases by a small and in other cases by a large margin. In other words: those who ask questions about literary topics will, on the whole, get better and fuller responses than those who ask questions about scientific topics. The scientific answers are not wrong, but they are less complete and less balanced than the literary ones.

Science education in crisis

That public libraries are shaped by a literary rather than a scientific culture is hardly news. But it is interesting to see familiarity and distance manifest themselves in concrete verbal behaviour. Is this a library problem? If public libraries are defined as cultural institutions in a narrow sense, with particular responsibilities towards local history, fiction and the arts, we cannot expect the staff to be equally up to date in science, technology and medicine.

But if users who ask scientific questions receive weaker answers, we face an educational problem. The sciences are in trouble. In secondary school, young people avoid subjects that depend on mathematical skills - mathematics, informatics, physics, chemistry. Their teachers did the same twenty years ago. Mathematics is a discipline in both senses of the word. It has a tightly integrated inner structure, and it can only be mastered through persistence. Its rigour fits badly with a youth culture that favours variation, communication and intense experience.

Libraries could do much more to stimulate scientific interests. But other actors are also active. Academic communities organise their own virtual reference desks. Sweden and Denmark have come far, with big and well-run services like Ask a researcher (Fråga en forskare), Ask About Science ( Spørg Naturvidenskaben), Ask Lund about mathematics (Fråga Lund om matematik) and Ask Stella (Spørg Stella) - about astronomy. In the U.S., we find several hundred subject oriented reference services. A national network between libraries and these AskA-services is emerging.

In Norway the process has been much slower. In March 2002 we found eight active scientific VRDs in Norway:

1. Ask a geologist. Norwegian Geological Survey.
2. Ask a paleontologist. Paleontological Museum. University of Oslo. A
3. You ask and we answer. Geophysical Institute. University of Bergen. Covers the subjects meteorology and oceanography.
4. Ask a biologist. Norwegian Biological Association.
5. Ask the professor. New Media Planet. All subjects - including humanities.
6. Ask Lexa about nature and the environment. School Net. Web site for pupils in primary school.
7. Schrödinger`s cat. Norwegian State Television. Popular program on science. Answers questions on subjects presented in recent programs.
8. Puggandplay. Norwegian State Television. Educational program for pupils between 9 and 12 years. Covers math, science and Norwegian.

Services 1-4 represent academia. They are low-key operations and not very well edited. The services 5-8 include one commercial company (New Media Planet) and three initiatives in public education. These four are as well designed as the leading Swedish, Danish and U.S. services.

The demand for information and the supply of answers is likely to grow. The potential “market” is great. ATL is a general service for a general public of 4 million citizens. It receives about 300 questions a month. Puggandplay is a specialized service, for the subjects math, science and Norwegian, aimed at 250 thousand children. It receives about 1 000 questions a month. The second audience is asking 50 times as many questions (per 1000 persons and month).

In a few years there should be a substantial number of scientific VRDs in Norway as well. They will target children and youngsters and be operated by educational and scholarly communities. Our public libraries are therefore faced with a strategic choice: (1) peaceful, but uncoordinated, coexistence; (2) mutual awareness and informal division of labour, and (3) tight integration based on joint interfaces and shared databases. We suspect users would prefer the third option.

Reference as a market

Public libraries are financed by the municipalities. Their services are free of charge. But reference increasingly works like a market. There are competing suppliers of information. Many of the new services are also free of charge. Public agencies and voluntary organisations are eager to inform the general public.

Commercial actors use free services as bait. To promote their products they must reach the customer`s mind. The knowledge economy is an attention economy. People must be aware that your company exists before they can judge your goods. The scarce factor is eyeballs. Free information, including free reference services, is a way of creating product visibility and brand loyalty.

The transition from industrial to knowledge based production gives knowledge institutions a central economic role. The core competence of librarians is now in high demand. New tasks, new professions and new institutions emerge for those who can organise, retrieve and present vital knowledge. But it may be easier for librarians to change their jobs than for libraries to change their robes.

Nobody expects our public libraries to be radical - to provoke and challenge their local constituencies. But even a small practical step - conducting reference by e-mail - will give libraries a taste of the technological forces and the social processes that transform their future.

References

1. Duvold, Ellen-Merete (2002). Folkebibliotekets betydning i folks hverdagsliv. Current book
2. England, Len; Sumsion, John (1995). Perspectives of public library use. A compendium of survey information. Loughborough: Loughborough university of technology.
3. Google answers (2002). URL = https://answers.google.com/answers/main. Checked May 25, 2002.
4. Hummelshøj, Marianne (2002). Web-based community information services. Current book
5. Høivik, Tord (2000). Har veven svaret? Norsk tidsskrift for bibliotekforskning nr. 13, p. 9-25.
6. Høivik, Tord (1997). Sink, swim or surf : the future of reference work in Norwegian public libraries / In Beaulieu, M.; Davenport, E. ; Pors, N. O. Library and information studies : Research and professional practice. London : Taylor Graham, p. 44-60.
7. Richardson, John V. (2002). Reference is better than we thought, Library journal, April 15, p. 41-42

Oslo
Tord Høivik, 2002/05/25