Back to Plinius: Roman shoe

Summary

The quality of reference work in public libraries is highly variable. This is well known from the United States. Norway, Sweden and Denmark face the same problem. A Norwegian research project documented substantial flaws in the average level of service almost 10 years ago. But the results have not led to substantial corrective action. This paper asks why?

Our main conclusion is institutional. The library system lacks social mechanisms for learning from research. Today, the forces that promote change are too weak to transform established ways of working. Librarians know the evidence, but they do not act on it. Evidence-based librarianship requires a change in the relationship between research and action – which means a change within the professional identity itself. Serious attention to evidence is more likely to result from technology than from deliberate choice.

Contents

1. Reference quality as a problem
2. Is the evidence biased?
3. The lack of action
4. Resistance to change
5. Social carriers of change
6. How professions learn
7. Research and practice: a missing link
8. Transactions: brief, private and ordinary
9. Digital reference: a technological carrier of change
10. Summing up: the argument in brief

1. Reference quality as a problem

Public libraries provide a variety of services. One of them is reference. Libraries invite the general public to ask any questions they want – and take pride in providing professional answers on any topic. Reference work is not the most important library service, but it ranks near the top. In most library schools, training in reference subjects belongs to the core curriculum. A librarian without reference skills is an incomplete librarian.

We know, at the same time, that the quality of reference work is highly variable. In the United States, systematic studies of reference quality go back to the nineteen sixties. In Scandinavia, such studies only started in the middle eighties. But the results were similar: the chance of getting a full and complete answer was below 60% – and sometimes far below. In the first Norwegian study, which was undertaken in 1993 – see Salvesen (1994) – less than 30% of the test questions received adequate answers.

The Norwegian study was inspired by a Danish project from 1984. The Norwegian results were widely reported and discussed in Sweden – and led to a Swedish investigation using similar methods – see Jansson (1996). In all the Scandinavian cases, the quality levels fell below the US average. And this average – the famous 55%-rule – is itself dismally low. Effective libraries ought to give full and satisfying answers to 80-90% of all reference questions.

2. Is the evidence biased?

It should be mentioned, however, that nearly all studies of reference quality focus on a particular type of inquiry: factual questions with definite answers. In addition, survey questions tend to be more difficult than the average. Most factual questions in public libraries are easy to answer:

• What is the smallest state in the world?
• Is Jerusalem a maritime city?
• What does the girl`s name Ylva mean?Source: Oslo Public Library digital reference service

The Scandinavian studies used more difficult queries. This means that the 55%-rule has a bias. It does not apply to reference in general, but only to a subset of the queries. As Richardson (2002b) points out, reference is better than we thought.

If we exclude directional and administrative questions (“where are the newspapers?”, “why must I have a card to borrow books?”, the three main types of reference transactions are

1. Topical. Users require information about a a subject, theme or topic
2. Document identification. Users require factual information about specific documents – usually in order to retrieve the documents
3. Factual. Users require factual answers to concrete and specific questions

The relative proportions vary quite a bit between libraries. In a study of British public libraries, reported in England (1995), the percentage of factual questions decreased when the size of the library increased, from 51% in a small rural unit to 28% in the Westminster Reference Library in London (Table 1). Höglund (1997) found much lower rates for factual inquiries – below 2% – in a study of six public libraries in Sweden in 1995.

At Oslo Public Library a sample of one hundred physical questions in 1997 were distributed as follows (Høivik, 2000) :

topical – 56%; document – 27%, factual – 17%

These questions were addressed to a specialized reference section in Norway`s biggest public library. A study of five hundred digital questions in 2000-2002 gave the same ranking (Høivik, 2003):

topical – 71%; document – 19%; factual – 11%.

Difficult topical and document questions probably have higher success rates than difficult factual questions. This means that libraries have been tested under more stringent conditions than the average.

But in our context, this is not essential. The Scandinavian tests were not extreme. Professional service providers should be able to maintain their standards under moderate pressure. We must still conclude that public libraries did not achieve reasonable quality levels.

2. The lack of action

For the library communities in Scandinavia, the results came as a shock. The research was widely reported and hotly debated at library conferences. It was distributed through professional journals and report series. But what did actually happen in the service?

Basically : very little. Established forms of reference work continue. The information from the survey was clear enough. But nothing substantial happens. Practicing librarians do not deny the evidence. But they do not act on it. Library students learn about quality theory and quality management as part of their studies. But the knowledge is not applied.

After the project, some concrete steps were taken. In Norway, the original report was followed by additional studies. One of the project partners, the public library in Tønsberg, wrote a manual for improving reference services. They also introduced systematic quality procedures. For several years, there was a strong demand for training courses in reference interviewing.

But the total response, from the public library community as a whole, has not been strong. Only a handful of libraries have introduced some forms of quality control routines. At the national level, performance measurement was not a visible concern. On the whole reference continues as before.

I cannot speak for Denmark and Sweden, but I suspect their situation is similar. The quality evidence is neglected rather than rejected. In other words: research may show the need for change, but it does not in itself create change. The quality problem in public libraries is no longer a lack of insight, but a lack of action. The professional values are clear: the users deserve good answers. The empirical results are highly convincing: the users do not get what they deserve. Additional quality studies will hardly help. There is a gap between understanding and practice that must be bridged.

But why is it so difficult to act on the results? What makes effective quality control of reference work so hard to achieve?

4. Resistance to change

The answer, I believe, ultimately lies in the nature of library organizations. Large organizations are not – in general – eager to innovate or learn. But organizational culture also reflects the social environment. In rapidly changing areas – the arts, media, front-edge technology – organizations tend to welcome innovation. In more stable milieus – insurance, railways, libraries – regularity and tradition reigns. Librarians love to speak about their roots: Alexandria, Athens and medieval monks. The past is always present.

Organizations in stable fields are inherently conservative. A suitable term is inertia. Newton`s first law of motion describes the inertia of physical objects. But it works for most organizations as well:

An organization at rest remains at rest. An organization in motion continues to move in the same direction – unless it is pushed off-course by a new force.

Most people and most organizations long for constancy rather than for change. We want predictable environments at work. We want mastery and control. Innovation is resisted rather than embraced. We want stability, which is another word for inertia. We want to be in charge.

Librarians are collectors and custodians of documents. And libraries are slowed down by the tremendous mass of their collections. The head of Oslo public library once described herself as the captain of a dreadnought. Orders may be given from the bridge, but a change of course, with one million volumes in tow, is a long and slow process. Inertia is a property of mass.

Large public libraries are hierarchical: a director at the top, department heads below, with ordinary librarians and library assistants at the bottom. Like hospitals and universities, libraries are professional bureaucracies. The power that comes from administrative superiority coexists with the power that comes from professional expertise.

5. Social carriers of change

Resistance to change is normal. Library rhetoric is full of “challenges” and “visions”. But the words are divorced from reality. Organizations in general, and library organizations in particular, seek constancy. They function like homeostatic systems: when they are pushed in a new direction, they push back.

Homeostasis needs no additional explanation. In organizations, inertia is the normal state of affairs. Reference work is no exception. The interesting question therefore becomes: how is institutional change at all possible?

The most obvious answer is technology. During the last thirty years, new information technology has transformed many aspects of library operations – including reference work. Yesterday, the speed and range of information retrieval was revolutionized by the new databases. Today, the web gives our customers direct access to information resources – and the demand for basic reference services is declining.

Technology-based change will continue. Tomorrow, print documents and physical loans will be the exception. Digital and virtual services will be the norm. But technology is a force that comes from the outside. It makes an impact whether we like it or not. Evidence-based librarianship represents something different: a deliberate approach to change.

If we look for agents or carriers of social change, we could – in principle – locate them in one of the following groups:

1. the library clients (customers)
2. the government that pays for public library services (local government)
3. the library administrators (management)
4. the librarians (profession)

What can customers do?

In public libraries, the customers have very little power. Firms that compete on the consumer market, must adapt to survive. An organization that lends books and provides answers for free, does not face the same exigency. Library clients do not organize themselves and demand better service quality. They do not sue the libraries for failing to answer their questions. Nor can they threaten to transfer their reference queries to a different provider. Public libraries are local monopolies.

What can local government do?

In Norway, the government has started to take a strong interest in the quality and efficiency of municipal services. All municipalities are now asked to report detailed statistical service data, in a standardized form, to the Central Bureau of Statistics.

The Bureau has developed a sophisticated data base to store and present this information. Any person on the web can now use the data base to compare – for instance – the number of loans per staff year in different municipalities. Library statistics, which used to be of very limited political interest, can now be studied by local politicians and administrators. But for the time being I do not expect politicians to focus on quality in libraries. At the moment they have their hands full studying the quality of the school system.

When the political spotlight turns to libraries, the focus – I predict – will be on loans rather than reference work. It is easy to compile, to compare and to interpret lending statistics. The reference service is much more obscure. At the moment, our statistics on reference quantity (the number of reference transactions) are so poor that meaningful comparisons are impossible. Systematic data on reference quality are totally absent. The lack of routine reference data makes political intervention impossible. In five or ten years, this may change. But in the meantime, reference work can continue as before, quietly, in the background.

What can managers do?

Quality is a key word in modern management thinking. The quality concept comes from industrial mass production. In highly developed countries, consumers are highly demanding. The mass markets are brutally competitive. The firms that produce cars, CDs or Coca-Cola for the masses must safeguard the quality of their products – in order to protect their market shares.

During the last 10-20 years, industrial quality thinking has increasingly been brought into the service sector – first into private, and later into public services. Library schools and library managers have taken the subject to their hearts. We are surrounded by tools and materials for quality management: courses, conferences, articles, books and guidelines.

Official documents tend to describe organizations in terms of a rational model. In rational organizations, change results from deliberate planning. The ideal change process follows a series of steps or phases:

1. setting the goals
2. implementing the (sequence of) actions to realize the goals
3. observing the outcomes
4. comparing the outcomes with the goals
5. analyzing any deviations between outcomes and goals
6. correcting the actions (or – occasionally – the goals)

In our case, this would mean the following:

1. The library (authority) commits itself to reference quality as a specific (numerical) goal
2. The library develops and implements a plan to improve reference quality
3. The library monitors reference quality – and calculates one or more indicators of reference quality
4. The library compares the observed indicator values with the numerical norm
5. The library reacts to – and tries to explain – any substantial discrepancy between observation and norm
6. The library corrects the factors that caused the discrepancy. If that is impossible, the goals may be adjusted

But organizations involve interests as well as rationality. The implementation of new quality models often meets resistance from the staff. Since libraries are public institutions, employees have strong protection against dismissal. Since libraries are professional bureacracies, managers must share their power with the professions.

Professionals are not, in general, attracted to performance measurement. A profession is a group of persons that have a particular kind of training. The training is officially recognized and gives the candidates an exclusive right to certain positions or tasks. Professions are, in other words, small public monopolies. Within a profession, individuals tend to have substantial autonomy. Professionals are assumed to internalize the values of their profession. They do what is best for their clients because they are morally committed.

All quality models involve measurement. Quality is a property of the good or the service provided. In order to manage reference quality, we must know the quality level. Is it high or low? Does it go up or down? But once we start to observe quality, we are in fact monitoring the work of individual professionals very, very closely. Quality management threatens the cherished autonomy of professional people. Their office walls become transparent.

What can the profession do?

Professionals are not opposed to quality – but to measurement. They do not want to be monitored by administrators – like common employees. The evidence-based approach tries to avoid this dilemma – by locating the force of change within the profession itself.

Evidence-based librarianship is an intellectual import from another profession: medicine. Evidence-based medicine builds on two major ideas:

1. that medical practice should be based on the results of medical research
2. that the results of research must be drawn from systematic analysis (meta analysis) of all relevant projects

The first idea – research-based practice – goes back to the early 19th century. The second idea – systematic analysis – is quite recent (McMaster University, Canada, 1992).

If we say that librarianship should be evidence-based, we say that librarians should monitor, study and learn from the results of their own professional work. Evidence-based librarianship is a profession-oriented tool for change. Quality managers speak of learning organizations. Evidence-based librarianship suggests a learning profession.

6. How professions learn

EBM was an innovation. Evidence-based medicine represents a different way of doing medicine. Doctors that accept EBM, must change some of their customary practices. Doctors that work in teams, must change the practices of the team. In medicine EBM has been a success because it builds on established scientific methodology. Meta analysis as such is new, but the way of thinking is familiar to everybody with a research background.

In the library world, the problem is greater. Evidence-based librarianship would imply:

1. that library practice should be based on the results of library research
2. that the results of research must be drawn from systematic analysis (meta analysis) of all relevant projects

But in the library sector, the relationship between practice and research is weak. In most countries, librarianship is a craft or a semi-profession rather than a fully developed academic discipline. In Norway, the normal course of library studies takes three years. Our teaching is practical (or skill-oriented) rather than academic (or theory-oriented).

And this is a strength rather than a weakness. During the last few years, the library curriculum has become more theoretical and analytical. We now have a master program, and Oslo University College hopes to establish a doctorate program in the near future. But if most librarians had masters or doctorates, they would be poorly matched with the work most of them actually do.

Medical doctors must keep in touch with relevant medical research. They feel obliged – and are expected – to provide the best treatment possible. But medicine is a special profession. Since medical quality can be a matter of life or death, control mechanisms are exceptionally strong.

Libraries do not face the same pressures. Reference quality is not a matter of life and death. The consequences of low quality are less than dreadful. Librarians that fail, only waste the time of their customers. For the time being, reference quality is in the hands of the practitioners that populate the library system. Single studies, however shocking, are soon forgotten. Evidence is not enough.

From a professional point of view, the need for better reference services is evident. Libraries do not, as a whole, satisfy reasonable standards of reference quality. But the demand for improvement is low.

Public services improve when interest, standards, measurement and control develop together. But library authorities lack standards and statistics. Public libraries do not, in general, measure their reference activities. Local governments are not interested. They may care about their libraries, but they hardly care about the details of reference work as such.

The users of reference have limited leverage. As a group, they have an interest in reference quality. But since they only meet the library as individuals, there is no aggregation of their particular concerns into a collective demand.

Only the libraries and their managers have the power to act. And if they want to introduce formal quality procedures – including evidence-based methods – managers must cooperate closely with their staff. In professional bureaucracies top-down approaches are likely to fail.

7. Research and practice: a missing link

In this paper we have looked at a particular case: reference quality research in Norwegian public libraries. In order to explain the lack of evidence-based action, we had to consider a more general topic, however: the forces that oppose – or support – change in organizations.

Here we face a thorny issue: the relationship between library research and library practices. Research is generally seen as an innovative force. We assume that research revealing weaknesses will be followed by policies promoting change. But this is not always the case.

In medicine and in professions like architecture and engineering the link between research and action is strong. The ways of working are standardized, and new scientific results are gradually translated into better procedures. Quality control is ingrained in the profession.

But in librarianship research and practice are only loosely related. I see evidence-based librarianship as an effort to create strongers link between research results and operational practice. But the task is not easy. The Reference Assessment Manual that was published by the American Library Association in 1995 is a good example

“In the past”, the authors note in the introduction, “evaluations and research in libraries tended to be conducted only in a single library with an instrument developed especially for the study and seldom utilized in other libraries. … Easy access and identification of appropriate evaluation instruments should encourage people to replicate and build upon previous studies”

The total research effort was, in other words, too scattered to make much of an impact. Five hundred projects do not establish a science. Scientific knowledge is not an aggregation of results. Scientific knowledge is a coherent body of concepts, methods, interpretations and results. Science is a collective undertaking. It proceeds by discussion, criticism and re-evaluation among researchers. Scientific interaction requires conflict as well as cooperation. Sometimes we must struggle with our peers. Sometimes we can build on their work. Library researchers must interact deeply in order to create a collective body of knowledge.

The final step is to use the evidence. Library science is an applied discipline. The purpose of quality studies is to improve quality. If the projects end with conference lectures, publications and degrees, they are incomplete. In an important new book, Richardson and Saxton (2002) have tried to review, and to draw practical conclusions from, all important studies of reference transactions in English. This is a big step forward.

In physics or anthropology, we cumulate knowledge. Knowing that something is just so has a value in itself. But library science is not a theoretical discipline. Librarianship advances when the practices – the state of the art – improve. Quality testing has no meaning unless it leads to quality improvement. In the applied sciences, we cumulate practices.

In the pure sciences, whether natural or social, the researcher struggles to understand the empirical world. In the applied sciences, whether natural or social, the researcher struggles to change the empirical world. In library science, this means improved practices. If library practices remain unchanged, why should researchers continue to polish their methods?

8. Transactions: brief, private and ordinary

Traditional reference work is not very suitable for quality control. To be effective, standards require measurement. But typical reference transactions are – in general – too short, too private and too ordinary to be monitored.

The great majority of inquiries are answered in a few minutes. Clients are taken care of individually, on a drop-in basis. Reference appointments are rare. Practical reference work mostly takes the form of brief service encounters between two persons: the client and the librarian. There is hardly time for note-taking and written answers. Hence, there is no record of what goes on during the sessions.

It is not impossible to control quality under such conditions. Even brief encounters can be supervised. Burger shops and coffee bars do train their service staff in quick and friendly customer management. There is much libraries can learn about service levels from such extremely user-oriented operations.

But reference work is much less standardized. McDonalds`s may add chicken, fish and veggies to their portfolio – but the range of possible burger menus is still limited. Reference workers face a more complex situations. The variety of questions is endless. The number of relevant sources run into hundreds and thousands.

A recent Norwegian bibliography of current sources contains about 650 books – see Hald (1995). The Telephone Reference Service of New York Public Library draws on a Reference Room with about 2 000 volumes – not to speak of databases and the Web (Berliner (1992), introduction). Reference work, in other words, demands professional skills. Under such circumstances, defining, observing and imposing fixed quality standards is difficult.

Quality is not a free good: it comes with an effort. Perfection has a price. We are more willing to pay the price, if the lack of quality has serious consequences. Since we put our lives in their hands, doctors, nurses and airline pilots face strict quality controls.

Reference services are more humdrum and less consequential. The flow of questions reflect quite ordinary matters and concerns. We may be interested in the answers, but they are not essential to our well-being.

Some questions from Oslo Public Library

• I am looking for books about astral journeys
• Can you indicate some web pages with facts on Croatia. I need information on travel destinations, hotels, museums, restaurants aso.
• Did H.C. Andersen write Cinderella?
• How big is the largest US flag ever made?
• I need the opening lines from “Richard III” by Shakespeare – in Norwegian: “Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York”
• Did Jimi Hendrix make something called Riverside?

9. Digital reference: a technological carrier of change

Digital technology changes the way we work. Librarians were early adopters of digital technology. Electronic data processing suited the kind of large scale, standardized data processing libraries needed. The MARC format was developed by the Library of Congress in the 1960s. Massive printed bibliographies were replaced by data bases. Vendors like University Microfilms International, Institute for Scientific Information and Dialog transformed the process of professional information retrieval.

In the 1980s, personal computers started to invade offices everywhere. The division of labor within offices started to change. The occupation called typist disappeared. Or rather: we became our own typists. People that use their own PCs for drafting letters and documents, why should they bring in another person at the very end?

Through the 80s and 90s library catalogues were gradually converted to data bases – or automated, as we used to say. This made lending operations much more efficient. But the big change in reference work comes from digital communications: with e-mail and the Web. Libraries that accept questions and provide answers by e-mail, have already taken the first step on the Moon. Digital transactions can easily be stored and retrieved, monitored and reused. The reference process is no longer inherently private.

The new technology has the potential to change the way reference work is organized. Questions and answers are normally recorded in digital form. This record – the reference log – makes supervision and control of quality feasible. The cost of data collection is low. This means that inquiries and responses can be sampled, studied and evaluated without time-consuming ad-hoc surveys.

The change from physical to virtual reference work creates new opportunities for quality control. Virtual reference facilitates a more team-oriented, dedicated and analytical approach to reference work. Librarians and library assistants can more easily share their knowledge. Supervisors can check what goes on day by day. Managers can analyze “inquiry trends” and react accordingly. Digital reference can actually be evidence-based,

But digital services will also reveal, I believe, current weaknesses in reference work much more clearly. At the moment, virtual inquiries constitute rather less than one percent of all reference transactions in Norwegian public libraries. The digital answers are, on the average, clearly better than the “physical” answers. But solid answers take more time. If library users were more aware of the quality gap, they would all “go virtual”. But that would sink the system.

In the United States, the Virtual Reference Desk Project (2000) has published a set of quality guidelines for its members. Guideline 11, on publicity, states:

Services should inform potential users of the value that can be gained from use of the service. A well-defined public relations plan can ensure that services are well-publicized and promoted on a regular basis. Publicity should not create more demand than the service has capacity to handle.

Librarians live in a strange world. If they improve their services, they should not advertize the fact. Will there never be quality for the masses?

10. Summing up: the argument in brief

The whole paper can be summarized as follows:

1. Research projects show that the quality of reference work in public libraries is highly variable.
2. The level of quality is not better in Scandinavia than in the United States. Norwegian librarians are well aware of the evidence.
3. But the projects have not led to substantial change in reference practices. How can we explain this lack of action?
4. Library organizations – in general – seek stability rather than change. Reference services – in particular – are resistant to change. Why?
5. There is no user pressure. The users are a lonely mass. They do not organize and do not complain.
6. There is no political pressure. Local politicians may be interested in libraries, but they are rarely interested in reference work.
7. There is no professional pressure. Professionals change their practices when they are motivated from the inside – or monitored from the outside.
8. Motivation does not work. Librarians facing the public are too busy to safeguard reference quality.
9. Monitoring is impossible as long as we lack statistical data on reference work.
10. Digital reference work may improve the situation – if libraries use the opportunity to collect, analyze and share data on reference transactions on a routine basis.

Bibliography

American Library Association (1995). The Reference Assessment Manual. Ann Arbor: The Pierian Press.

Berliner, Barbara (1992). The book of answers. The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service`s most unusual and entertaining questions. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Hald, Odd Heide and Jofrid Holter (1995). Here is the answer! Handbooks and bibliographies for reference work [= Her er svaret! Håndbøker og bibliografier til bruk i referansearbeidet]. Oslo: Biblioteksentralen.

Höglund, Anna-Lena (1997). “Äntligen en riktig fråga! Undersökning av referensverksamheten vid sex huvudbibliotek i Östergötland. [Linköping]: Länsbibliotek Östergötland

Høivik, Tord (2000). Does the web have the answer? [= Har veven svaret? ]. Norsk tidsskrift for bibliotekforskning nr. 13, p. 9-25.

Høivik, Tord (2003). Why do you ask? Reference statistics for library planning. Performance measurement and metrics, vol. 4, no. 1, p. 28-37.

Jansson, Britta-Lena (1996). “This was difficult”. Reference quality in public libraries [= "Det här var svårt". Referenstjänstens kvalitet ved folkbiblioteken.] Lund: Rapport från Statens Kulturråd 1996:3

Richardson, John V. and Matthew Saxton (2002a). Understanding Reference Transactions: Turning an Art into a Science. Library and Information Science Series. New York: Academic Press.

Richardson, John V. (2002b). Reference is better than we thought. Library Journal 127, p. 41-42.

Salvesen, Gunhild and Synnøve Ulvik (1994). Does the library find the answer? Assessing reference service quality in Norwegian public libraries [= Finner biblioteket svaret? Utprøving av referansetjenestens kvalitet i norske folkebibliotek]. Tønsberg: Tønsberg bibliotek.

Virtual Reference Desk Project. Facets of Quality for Digital Reference Services. Version 4. October 2000 [URL = http://www.vrd.org/facets-10-00.shtml - Read June 7, 2003]

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.

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

Abstract

The paper discusses the consequences of the web for the library as an institution over the next thirty years (2005-2035). We conclude that physical and virtual library services are likely to diverge. The physical library is threatened. Traditional services like document provision and reference work will largely move to the web. The physical library of the future must offer space for other activities that society will be willing to finance: systematic learning, cultural events, social integration, creative play or productive work. On the web virtual libraries and web-based librarians face strong competition from other institutions and professions. Both the physical and the virtual library will have to redefine their social roles. To prosper, libraries must find new partners and build new alliances – in education, culture, production and community work.

Terms: Future studies, scenarios, library strategies, digital libraries, virtual libraries

Contents

1. Four stages of web technology
   • The emerging web
   • The converging web
   • The intelligent web
   • The invisible web
2. Three library generations
   • The last print generation
   • The first web generation
   • The second web generation
3. Three user groups
   • Learners
   • Citizens
   • Professionals
4. Four types of libraries
   • School libraries
   • Academic libraries
   • Public libraries
   • Special libraries
5. Conclusion

Four stages of web technology

Libraries are cultural institutions with a technological basis. Libraries collect, store, organize and make available written documents. Documents are public goods: my reading does not compete with your reading of the same book – except just before exams. The general role of libraries, in the social division of labor, is to increase the value of documents by multiplying access. The economic rationality is obvious: libraries facilitate the widest possible use of humanity’s written record.

Libraries as we know them belong to the industrial age. From the very beginning printed books were standardized, mass-produced objects. In many ways print was an industrial revolution – prefiguring the age of industry in the 19th and early 20th century. Books and periodicals on paper will hardly disappear. Print is a cheap, flexible and sophisticated technology for storing and distributing information. It ought to be, since it builds on more than five hundred years of trial, error, and innovation. But web publishing is even cheaper, even more flexible, and allows forms of reading (interaction with text) that go far beyond the possibilities of paper.

In the long run, web-based documents will play a greater role in our lives than documents on paper. In our personal life stories, the transition may seem slow. But in a historical perspective, it is exceptionally fast.

The emerging web

Fourteen years ago Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau (1990) submitted their proposal for a hypertext project to CERN. The rest is history. The early web was created as a tool for technical communication. Its first target group was scientists, engineers and administrators in high-energy physics. But the number of users soon exploded. By the turn of the century close to three hundred million people were using the web at least once a month. The social impact of the web was still low. But politicians, executives and opinion leaders were watching carefully. What would happen next? What would the web mean in business, in public administration, in trade and in education?

The converging web

Since 1990, computers and web technology have continued their rapid development. The famous law that George Moore (1965) formulated remains valid. The storage capacity and the processing speed of computers are still doubling every 18 months. This means that computer power multiplies by a factor of 1,000 every fifteen years. Such a rate of technological growth is unique in history. To illustrate, let us apply Moore’s law to cars. In 1965, an ordinary family car could easily carry four persons and a dog at a speed of 100 kms per hour. In 2010, the corresponding vehicle would be able to transport one hundred families at the speed of light. Dogs included.

Today, the web dominates business development in many countries. The digital consumer market flourishes. The market is driven by faster data transfer (broadband), cheaper storage media, higher mobility and richer multimedia (digital sound and video). All digital devices become smaller, lighter and more powerful. Networks become faster, cheaper and more mobile. All media are converging.

Convergence means that cell phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, e-books and other portable devises fuse with laptops and personal digital assistants (PDAs). We end up with mobile multipurpose wireless computers that can be carried around like paperbacks. But they can access the web as a whole. The web is visibly changing the way we do business. It is starting to change the way we do education. It is likely to change the way we conduct politics.

The intelligent web

I use the term intelligence to describe the stage after convergence. Tim Berners-Lee (2001) calls it the semantic web. Intelligence is the ability to gather, to process and to act on complex information. Intelligent interfaces will accept speech and handwriting as well as keyboard entry. Intelligent programs are able to guess what people want to do, even if their input is fuzzy. It will correct obvious misprints – `get me a thicket to Paris`. If the traveler speaks with a Texan drawl, it may ask for clarification: – `would you like to go to Paris in France, or to Paris, Texas? `

HTML was originally created as a mark-up language for technical report-writing. Since the early nineties it has been stretched and pulled to cope with many other tasks. But many user communities need documents with much more structural information than naked HTML can provide. Intelligent technologies for the web represent an area of active research, development and demonstrations. Major topics are language technology, document coding and pattern recognition.

XML, topic maps and ontologies will allow much more complex processes on the web – see Garshol (2004). Web agents (robots) will be able to find, combine and present information in new ways. Today, programs manipulate sequences of symbols, but do not relate them in terms of meaning. Computers recognize that “cats” and “dogs” each have four characters. But it does not “know” that they are traditional enemies.

Oslo Public Library answered this question a couple of years ago: `I need a list of grocery stores in Sunnmøre [a region on the west coast of Norway], with their dates of establishment. It should be ordered by municipality`. On the semantic web, students should be able to find such types of information by themselves. But the systems that would allow them to do so must of course be developed, documented and maintained.

The invisible web

Mature technologies do not demand attention. I am not surprised when water runs from my tap and light pours from my lamp. We accept their presence without thinking. It takes a real mental effort to remember the planning, the dedication, and the hard work that carries water, gas and electricity into our houses. We live in a world of industrial magic. And we take the magic for granted. This is utterly normal. Human beings can only be aware of a few objects at a time. In life, we have to focus – on goals and on obstacles. The rest of the universe must hide in the bushes.

Good tools offer no resistance. Tools that offer no resistance turn transparent. When I read, I do not look at my glasses. I look through my glasses. Today the web is sometimes transparent and sometimes foggy. I have learnt to treat it as a sparring partner. If I dance like a butterfly, it stings like a bee. If I kick like a horse, it bites like a crocodile. I learn a lot, but the cost is high. But as the web matures, it will turn from boxer to butler. My daily struggles with software, interfaces and stupid peripherals will end. Three star restaurants illustrate what I want: smooth, instant, impeccable service.

I expect the web to reach this stage fifteen or twenty years from now. It will turn safe, dull and ordinary. It will become ubiquitous, like air. Weber spoke about the routinization of charisma. As a Webber I speak about the routinization of technology. If you want a more detailed picture of the web in 2035, you can turn to science fiction. Writers like Gibson (1986, 1987, 2000) and Stephenson (1993, 1995) describe a great variety of digital futures. But the web is always taken for granted. Looking ahead, we may distinguish three different user generations.

Three library generations

The last print generation

The people born around 1945 went to school in the fifties and early sixties. The public libraries had no computers and no OPACs. To locate books, we consulted imposing card catalogues. I was an eager reader, but I do not remember a school library. They existed but played no role in teaching. At university I frequented both the central university library, and the institute libraries that were devoted to particular subjects like philosophy or chemistry. I also spent time with computers at the Norwegian Computing Centre. But I never saw a computer at the library. Books and computers lived in different worlds.

With time, we graduated – and got jobs; married – and got families. As a statistician, I kept in contact with computing technology. But to most of my peers, ICT was a matter of print, paper and telephones. Data was seen as technical specialty: leave it to the experts! But as we approached forty, computers began to infiltrate our life-worlds. The personal computer replaced the type-writer – and the typists. The organization of office work changed. We protested – but in vain. The typing pool went down the drain. For the pre-web generation, the office PC was the first digital shock. We survived and moved on. But the gods of technology sent the personal computer as a warning. The next invasion was larger, deeper and much more pervasive.

My generation approached fifty when Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web. A few of us were excited by the new technology. In 1992 we started teaching HTML to librarians – but only in a further education course. At my faculty it took a decade for information architecture and web publishing to be accepted within the regular curriculum.

Now we are sixty. The generation of 45 is willing to use the web in a small way. We surf a bit, read e-mail and buy cinema tickets on the web. But working habits are hard to change. The majority of my peers are consumers of web services rather than web producers. My generation grew up with Gutenberg and looks forward to retirement. Why should they spend the few working years that remain in uphill struggles with new technology? Employers accept their reluctance and leave them in peace. But this only applies to the oldest cohort. I belong to the last generation that can choose to abstain.

The first web generation

The people who were born around 1975 grew up without computers. In the eighties the PC was still an office phenomenon. Only a few enthusiasts brought computers into their homes. The same was true for schools. The generation of 75 only discovered the web in the late nineties, when government, banks and business started to take notice. But they did not protest and they did not hide. They know the web is inevitable. Next year, the first web generation turns thirty. For this cohort the web is already a normal component of normal lives. They send and receive hundreds of e-mails a month. They buy computers for themselves and for their kids. They upgrade to ISDN and ADSL as a matter of routine.

The 1975 cohort arrived just in time to catch the big wave. They will spend the next thirty years riding it. Some will be fast on the uptake and some a bit slower. Every generation has early and late adopters. But as a group they will embrace the new technology.

People typically reach the summit of their careers between fifty and sixty. In 2035 senior decision makers in business, government and education will be drawn from the first web generation. Digital technology will have shaped their lives. Their daily routines – at work and play – will be digital. If you really want to know a field, you must become a producer. Consumers stay on the surface. The first web generation will understand e-business, e-learning and e-culture from the inside – because they were present at the creation. They made it.

The second web generation

The second web generation is the children and inheritors of the first. They will be born next year. At the moment they only exist in the minds of their parents or the wombs of their mothers. The generation of 2005 will grow up in deeply digital world. At home, they will encounter broadband connections, computer games and videos-on-demand. At school, all subjects will involve ICT. Parents, friends and the web itself can always be reached by mobile phone. Their web will be able to speak and listen. Computer-generated persons (avatars) will answer frequently answered questions (FAQs) – and pass more difficult queries on to real human beings.

For us, such facilities still seem glamorous. For the youngsters, they will be as ordinary as light bulbs. They do not remember a time when the web was not. The first web generation is aware of the step from print to screen. The second generation takes the web for granted.

To survive and flourish, libraries must serve the users of the future. But the term “user” is too broad. In order to grasp specific needs and trends we must look at specific groups of users. Personally, I find the following user categories helpful: (1) learners – or people who use libraries in connection with formal education; (2) citizens – or people who use libraries in their free time, for individual or communal purposes; (3) professionals – or people who use the libraries as part of their (paid) work. The three groups may overlap. Many professionals are enrolled in formal education programs. And at home, as individuals, learners and professionals are also citizens. The groups do not consist of individuals as such, but of individuals that fill specific roles.

In 2015, adult users of libraries will come from the first generation. Young users of libraries will come from the second. Both generations will lead busy lives. A multitude of activities will compete for their attention. How can libraries continue to be relevant to these people?

Three user groups

Learners

At any one time, a large proportion of the population is engaged in formal learning activities. A reasonable estimate for Norway in the years after 2010 can be: 16% of the population at school and 5% in higher education.

Formal education has been changing for several decades, from a receptive, teacher-centered towards an active, student-centered approach. The traditional system was described by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1972) as the “piggy-bank” model. Teachers were seen as repositories of knowledge. Education meant the gradual transfer of knowledge from the brain of the teacher to the brain of the student.

The new system is focused on learning rather than on teaching. As teachers, our main task is to promote learning activities. This does not mean that we never lecture or never grade tests. But it means that we have a broader understanding of what goes on in our classes. We draw on a wider set of teaching tools. We design environments and processes that encourage students to learn.

Learning is still hard work. `Ultimately, real education must be limited to those who insist on knowing`, says T.S. Eliot. But the new model is much more aware of learning as delight. Humans are naturally curious and inventive. Mastering new levels of skill, and tackling completely new subjects, can give learners a sense of power. Student-centered teaching calls on the joy of mastery – and reduces the amount of external control to a minimum.

Citizens

I choose the term “citizen” for people that consult libraries for their own personal purposes. In our spare time, released from the demands of school and work, we all become citizens. European public libraries are libraries for citizens. The institution serves the community as a whole, not schools and businesses as such.

In addition to its primary task, the library may also assist school children, students and professionals. But the central category of users remains people that pursue their own interests, by themselves or in association with others. Typical subgroups are defined by normal stages of life, e.g.: (1) young children – who mainly use the library together with their parents; (2) older children, or pre-teens – who are able to use the library on their own: (3) teenagers; (4) young adults – without children of their own; (5) young parents – who often use the library together with their kids; and finally (6) older adults.

Individual users have library careers. If they grow up in bookish families, they may visit libraries before they can walk. They will play with toys and look at picture books. Older children tend to be intensive library users. In adolescence, many boys turn to other activities. Reading is for sissies. But girls continue to explore imaginary worlds through books. The gender gap continues into early adulthood. We must also remember that many people and some families never use the library at all.

Professionals

The people that use libraries in connection with their work are the group we know least about. Today, more than 40% – but less than half – of the labor force work in occupations that require higher education skills. The number of people who take higher education continues to increase. After 2020, more than 60% of the labor force will probably have completed some form of higher education. The professionals will be a majority, and the non-professionals a minority, in the working population.

Libraries at work constitute the most exposed group. The change brought by the web threatens the special libraries first. There are very few libraries in the private sector. The libraries in the public sector are under increasing economic pressure. A few have already been closed. Top managers ask pointed questions. What do they contribute? Can their services be dispensed with?

But all libraries need to look at their basic support. Today all educational institutions and all municipalities in Norway provide dedicated library services. Access and use is best in higher education (Table 1). Schools differ widely in the quality and utilization of their libraries. The same is true for local communities. But who will be around thirty years from now?

Students

I assume the trend towards student-centered teaching will continue at all levels of education, from kindergarten to doctoral programs. As an educational trend, this development started in the 1960`s, long before the World Wide Web was born. But the Web supports the trend towards active learning. A PC can provide nearly all the working tools that active learners need: (1) a variety of communication channels: e-mail, discussion groups, interactive web pages; (2) a wide range of information sources; and (3) a vast set of production tools: presentation programs, word processors, spreadsheets, web editors, graphic editors…

But important obstacles remain. Many students and most teachers have yet to master the necessary tools. Schools and colleges have accepted e-mail, but struggle with more advanced communication systems. On the production side, basic word processing is current. But spreadsheets (Excel), web editors (Dreamweaver) and graphics editors (PhotoShop) are only tackled by a minority of teachers and learners.

A more serious problem derives from the very nature of the web. WWW is wonderfully free and open. It is the most democratic medium ever invented. On the web, every person can be her own publisher. The down side is the lack of quality control. Printing is expensive, so printed publications go through processes of submission, selection and editing before they are released on the public. Most web publishing is pure samizdat.

The majority of teachers will only embrace the web when it can challenge print as a technology for learning. Effective web-based learning requires dedicated web sites. Web teaching must be able to compete with the best modern textbook. We must create deep and rich learning environments – not a jungle of the good, the bad, and the awful. If the content is good, the teachers will come.

Four types of libraries

School libraries

School libraries have both a physical and a virtual aspect. Schools are likely to remain as physical institutions. But the new learning environment will be richer and more flexible. Many libraries in teaching institutions are changing their names to learning centers. Many librarians are attached to the old term and oppose the change. But in terms of strategy I believe the re-labeling is correct.

The central task of schools is learning. The school library can play a central role in the transition from a teacher-centered to student-centered approach. In the digital environment, physical collections will gradually become less important. Libraries can offer a dedicated space for individuals and groups that work with information and media. But it is crucial that the library should be more than a place where resources are stored. It must also be a place where resources are actively used. .

Libraries must attach themselves tightly to the new processes of learning. Students who work with sources (in the widest sense) will need spaces where they can pursue many different learning activities: read, watch and listen; compare, discuss and evaluate: write, compose and edit. If such spaces can be created within libraries, they are likely to prosper. If not, the physical school library may wither and die. Media rooms, workshops and group rooms will take its place. Resource-based learning will go on as before. But it will be supported and supervised by people from other professions.

Academic libraries

The great majority of subjects in higher education are based on written documents and verbal discussion. In the humanities and social sciences, students work in a textual universe. They listen to lectures that expound the canon – and learn the canonical methods of research. They work with textbooks and classical texts. And they contribute texts of their own – for the benefit of their teachers, their fellow students and their final grades. In the sciences, field trips and lab work are added. But science students continue to read and write.

This will continue in the digital environment. This means that texts and documents remain relevant for undergraduate learning. But undergraduate libraries are in the same position as school libraries: they must attach themselves firmly to teaching and learning activities in order to survive. A great tradition is not enough. In the future, libraries for students will only be financed if they provide a visible contribution to learning.

Undergraduate students go to standardized lectures and carry out standardized exercises. Student behavior is largely shaped by the teachers. The average student aims at an acceptable grade. She hopes to achieve it with a modicum of effort. She will only use the library if it pays to use the library. And this is normally decided by the teacher. But university teachers are acrobats. They will only cooperate with librarians if they must. Every day they juggle the demands from classes, colleagues and conferences. They are seldom interested in libraries as such. They will only include libraries in their juggling act if the benefit is evident.

Libraries must cooperate with teachers in designing digital learning environments. This is a new and difficult task for both professions. At the moment I suspect teachers are more uncomfortable with digital resources.

Undergraduates can be handled as a group. In graduate and further education, students work in smaller groups and go to fewer lectures than their younger peers. They study the more advanced literature in their professional fields and are expected to write papers and theses based on independent work. Some of their projects will involve original data collection, and some of their reports will include original research.

These students require a great variety of written sources. In a couple of decades, nearly all the relevant documents are likely to be on the web. But they will need good retrieval tools in order to find the documents they require. The lecturer is normally a specialist in the field and will select the curriculum on the basis of her personal knowledge of the literature. But the library can provide useful support by organizing easy web access to all the readings – and by providing correct and updated bibliographical data.

At the graduate level, libraries must offer individual service. In 9 cases out of 10 the students will be under pressure to complete their work in time. In contact with the library they will need rapid, competent and highly specific service.

Public libraries

As citizens we use libraries in two different ways: as a source of documents and as a physical meeting place. In the past, the two functions went together. The physical library was a place for books as well as for people. Today, the roads diverge. As citizens, we want access to a great variety of texts. Some we use to relax, some we use to reflect and some we use as tools in our many tasks and projects. The general demand for documents is likely to go up rather than down.

But in 2035, we can safely assume that most documents in wide use will be available in digital form, on the World Wide Web. Novels constitute the big exception. When people speak about public libraries they often refer to novels. And it is quite true that the novel is important. In Norway, fiction – mainly novels – constituted nearly 50% of all loans in 2002. The remaining 50% were divided equally between non-fiction books (25%) and multimedia products (25%).

But if we only consider novels, we will underestimate the movement towards the web. Current PCs are not suitable for novels. Novels are meant for sustained reading. The novel is a conservative genre. Novels in book form are likely to be with us for a long time. But multimedia and non-fiction genres are moving rapidly from physical to virtual form.

Citizens are interested in a great variety of documents (Table 2). This will surely continue. Public libraries must move their non-fiction services to the web in order to survive as general document providers. On the web they will face competition from other virtual providers: publishers, book stores, schools, web portals and government institutions.

To play a major role in the virtual environment, public libraries must build on their particular strengths: (1) community building: they know how to document their own local communities; (2) knowledge organization: they know how to organize large numbers of documents for retrieval: (3) price: they are free of charge.

As community organizations, public libraries have a valuable role in documenting local history and culture. But they must be willing to share that role with local archives and museums. On the web, the traditional distinction between printed documents, archive documents and museum objects disappears. The web recognizes only one type of entity: the digital file. As organizers of virtual knowledge, public libraries transcend the local level. The web serves everybody. On the web it seems reasonable to ask for national services – managed by national library networks. Or global services – managed by global networks. Restricting services to particular user groups seems artificial.

Public libraries could, in principle, play a role without special buildings that are open to the public. The Internet Public Library (2004) is an example. But public libraries that are financed locally, by local authorities, need tangible links to the electorates.

Future citizens will take the web and all its services for granted. Why should they spend time visiting libraries? But our citizens still want to meet friends and neighbors face to face. They have shopping, and errands and hobbies. There are problems to solve and promises to keep. The library can be a meeting-place, where people go to talk and plan and study together. This means a library with space for groups and group work. But libraries cannot replace parks, schools, clubs or cafes. They must have their own profile and identity. The meeting function must relate to the document function.

The library can also be the space you visit in the middle of your shopping. It can be a place to retreat, relax and recuperate – a home away from home. This means a library with space for noisy children and quiet reading. It means coffee. Marx would have said: the library is a place for reproduction. But since Marx is largely forgotten, people could misunderstand the term. The retreat function must also relate to the document function.

Special libraries

Special libraries serve the people that work in knowledge occupations. But the role of libraries is much more limited at work than in education and community life. I describe people with higher education as professionals. In Norway they constitute 40% of the labor force, or about 900 000 persons. But our special libraries had only 34 000 registered users in 2002. This means that only four percent of the professionals are library customers at work. This suggests that most of them get the information they want from other sources.

In one or two decades, the number of professionals may increase from 40 to 60% of the labor force. At the same time, the economic importance of knowledge will increase. In a fully developed knowledge economy, the demand for accurate, wide-ranging, personalized information will be very high indeed. But professionals are not interested in the library as a physical space. They want user-friendly information services at their desks or at their palm tops. If libraries can deliver what they need – fine. If not, somebody else will step in.

Conclusion

During the next thirty years, our organizations will be reshaped by digital technology. The primary concerns of societies – education, work and social integration – will not change. But in 2035 they will be managed in deeply digital environments. Many traditional functions are moving away from the physical library. The web has its own logic. In order to prosper, virtual services must be organized on a large scale. Many reference and delivery services are taken over by new information firms. On the web libraries must network and go virtual if they want to compete.

In order to survive the transformation from paper to data, all libraries must look at their ultimate purpose. The industrial age is past. Their old contracts with society are running out of steam. The digital age is knocking on the door. In the digital environment libraries will need new social contracts. The web is wide enough for everybody. But they must offer services that their owners and constituencies are willing to pay for. The prescription is brief, but radical: the library institution must recreate itself.

References

1. Berners-Lee, T. (2001) The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 17, 2001
2. Berners-Lee, T.; R. Cailliau [electr.doc.] (1990) WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, http://www.w3.org/Proposal.html [visited May 1, 2004]
3. Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
4. Garshol, L.M. [electr.doc.] (2004) Metadata? Thesauri? Taxonomies? Topic Maps! Making sense of it all. http://www.ontopia.net/topicmaps/materials/tm-vs-thesauri.html [visited May 4, 2004]
5. Gibson, W. (1986). Neuromancer. New York: Ace science. – 271 s.
6. Gibson, W. (1987). Count Zero. London: Grafton. – 335 s.
7. Gibson, W. (2000). Mona Lisa Overdrive. London : Harper Collins. – 316 s.
8. Internet Public Library [electr.doc.] (2004), http://www.ipl.org/ [visited May 1, 2004]
9. Moore, G. M. [electr.doc.] (1965) Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits ftp://download.intel.com/research/silicon/moorespaper.pdf
10. Stephenson, N. (1993). Snow Crash. London: A Roc book. – 440 s.
11. Stephenson, N. (1995). The Diamond Age. London : Bantham. – 455 s.

Goodbye Gutenberg

Throughout the world, teaching institutions are moving from a paper based to a web based form of teaching. Old and familiar technologies – pen, chalk and print – are gradually replaced by a wide range of digital tools and media: word processors, spreadsheets, e-mail, presentation programs, image editors, SMS and the ubiquitous World Wide Web.

At some point in their career, every teacher must decide what they could, should or must do to cope with this massive technological change. Some are fascinated by technology and move ahead as fast as their skills and institutions will allow. Others mourn the decline of the book and defend the beleaguered Castle of Gutenberg to the bitter end.

As a person I can appreciate both camps. I have always loved books, libraries and reading. But I am also fascinated by technology and its social impact. Literature and hi-tech are both forms of escape. They open the door that is hidden in the wall. They lead us to imaginary gardens. They splash purple and azure on a world in black and white.

In this article, I look back at my experience with digital technology
in library teaching. I discover, with some surprise, that I have socialized
with computers for more than forty years. As a young student, I punched Hollerith cards and tended the cool machine monsters that swallowed them.

Today, the web is my paper and Dreamweaver my word processor. I am
not a programmer or a systems analyst. My main job has always been in
academic teaching and research. Information technology has always been a side-line. For the last twelve years I have taught library subjects
full-time. Earlier, when I worked in peace research, I taught information
retrieval on a part-time basis.

But my interest in computers is more than a hobby. Digitalization is
a massive process. Like industrialization in the 19th century, it touches
our societies and our lives at many levels. I want to understand – and
to enjoy – this force that transforms our life-world. Schools and universities are conservative institutions. Ways of teaching change slowly.

Bill Gates was right when he said: - in the digital field less happens in two years than we think. But in the long run, even teaching institutions must adapt. Gates added that – more happens in ten years than we think. In this article I look at the concrete and specific steps teachers typically take when they start their long and troubled march towards web-based teaching.

For several decades, computers had no real impact on how we taught. It
is only now, as the Web has reached its early teens, that ordinary teachers feel the pressure. The educators that embrace the Web are still a minority. The path from print to web is longer than most teachers realize. We have been deeply socialized into the technology of print. Our concepts and our practices are grounded in the Gutenberg galaxy.

The web is a different universe: vast, chaotic, uncanny. The web demands different skills, attitudes and practices. It changes the relationship between teachers and students. It changes the nature of teaching and learning. Since I am a library teacher, I draw my examples from libraries and library education. I believe the digital change favors the library profession. In a web-based learning environment library institutions become more relevant and library skills more crucial. But we have a long road in front of us.

Digital libraries

In Norway, library education was for many years an Oslo monopoly. The
College of Library Studies remained an independent institution until 1994. In that year, all vocational colleges were reorganized on a regional basis. More than twenty different professional schools – from accountancy to teaching – were brought together in Oslo University College. Within the college, seven faculties were set up. Thirty library teachers were reluctantly paired with 15 sceptical teachers of journalism – to form the new Faculty of Journalism, Library and Information Science. The honeymoon was stormy, but the match worked well. Today the Faculty is diversifying. Our subjects are perfect for the post-modern world. And we are developing new specialties: shorter courses on web publishing, archivistics and museums, and a full bachelor degree in media and communications.

I started to work at the College in 1992, and one of my first tasks
was to develop a post-degree course in reference work. The World Wide
Web had just been released. The potential impact of the web on library
services and on teaching was already evident – at least to people with
an understanding of technology and its social impact. But our culture
is humanistic rather than (natural) science oriented. It is only now,
more than a decade later, that most libraries and teaching institutions
are beginning to face the long-range consequences of web technology for
their professional practice. It will take another ten to fifteen years,
I suspect, before our institutions have fully adapted to the new state
of affairs.

But why the delay? Librarians are not technophobes. In the 1970s and
80s bibliographic databases were welcomed and adopted throughout the library world. In the cultural sector librarians were true pioneers in the use of mainframe computer technology. But the web represents a much deeper challenge. The introduction of databases went smoothly because it did not change underlying concepts and routines. Databases were instruments of reform. They vitalized existing practices. For 150 years librarians have worked with card catalogues. As students, candidate librarians receive intensive training in the logic of cataloguing. They fight with catalogues during the day and dream about them at the night. But the card catalogue is essentially a database on paper. If you master the one, you can master the other. Databases are domestic animals. They just provide more power. Let us call them horses.

‘Most librarians link their professional identity to their role as gatekeepers. The librarian mediates between users and information systems. The introduction of databases strengthened the gatekeeper function. Databases made the systems more complex as well as more powerful. The value of specialized library skills increased. The librarian remained in control. Her expertise could not be dispensed with. The average user never understood retrieval
beyond the most basic one word searches. She was baffled by Boolean logic.
Numerous studies studies of database searches came to the same conclusions. Users failed to understand the retrieval systems that
system engineers and librarians had designed for them. The OPACs remained opaque. From the user`s point of view system engineers and librarians failed to design user-friendly systems.

The web, on the contrary, puts the user in the driver`s seat. On the
web information producers must compete for attention. Here, usability
is more than a nice gesture – it is the road to survival and profit. In
the world of e-business and web portals, the transfer of control from
producers to users is clearly visible. We see the same trend in the library
sector. The virtual dimension of libraries is growing in range and depth.
Web discussions, seminars and professional articles signal major changes. The web is a revolutionary tool. It undermines the established order. If databases are horses, the web is a dragon.

With time, users start to behave differently. Web access is taken for
granted. The web is becoming an ordinary utility, like phones, MP3-players and electric light. Producers behave differently. Their awareness of the business environment changes. Web services are seen as essential. Firms switch resources and strategies towards the new medium. For organizations, the turning point is reached when executives define the web, rather than paper, as the primary route to their customers. Amazon is the trail-blazer. But many libraries are moving towards that point. Beyond the cusp the real web world begins…

Digital teaching

In the world of teaching, the process of restructuring is much more
recent. Librarians, I said, were happy to introduce computers. Teachers
hesitate. The reason does not lie in different attitudes to technology
as such. Librarians and teachers are cultural twins. As professions they
are shaped by humanistic rather than by scientific, technological or economic paradigms. To understand the difference in the reception of technology, we must look at activities rather than attitudes. Librarians
welcomed databases because they could think and work as before – only
faster. But teachers face the web rather than databases. They move slowly because the web challenges the very nature of teaching. The dragon can not be tamed like a horse.

I am not saying that teaching is purely social. All teaching is influenced
by technology. And teaching technology is not neutral. The text book turned students into readers rather than rhetors. The medieval art of disputation only survives – barely – at the doctoral level. In education, the web is slowly displacing the book. Whether we like it or not – volens nolens – the web will change the way we teach and the way students learn. But the question is how?

The web is truly different from paper. Technology is a formative force.
Web authoring is different from ordinary writing. I suspect we need another
generation to fully understand the web as a communication medium. But
we can at least start to reflect on its impact. This text presents
one teacher`s encounter with the dragon: my personal experience with the
web as a tool and a medium for teaching.

Web-based courses

My first meeting with web-based teaching occurred, as I said, in 1992.
The new reference course consisted of four modules, each lasting two full
weeks. The second module, which was offered in the spring 1993, was devoted
to the technical aspects of retrieval. In addition to data base searches
we included, for the first time, web based methods of retrieval. And we
took one further step: the course participants learnt enough HTML to create
pages with hyper links. The tools were primitive and clumsy. But the thrill
of making your own hyper links was important. The first step from web
user to web producer had been taken.

Four years later, the web was no longer a curiosity, but a major force
for change. In 1997 Netscape ruled the browser market – and Altavista
shared the retrieval market with Yahoo. The great majority of users were
still happy amateurs. We were playing and experimenting with our new and
shiny toy. But many decision makers had discovered the crucial importance
of the web. Governments and corporations and politicians financed big
strategic studies. Microsoft switched its whole development strategy from
proprietary information systems to the open web. It started work on Internet
Explorer and purchased the web editor FrontPage.

In 1997-98 my main course was library management. With
120 teaching hours, this is one of the central subjects during the third
(concluding) year of library studies in Oslo. Around us, PCs had become
widely available to students. And some of our classrooms had been equipped
with video cannons. You may remember the early ones: expensive, cumbersome,
three-eyed monsters. And I started to transfer the course from paper and
plastic overheads to the web. I taught this course for two more years,
increasing the web content step by step. Due to other commitments, I had
to transfer the course to my colleague Robert Vaagan in the summer of
2000. But since he is conversant with web publishing, and the whole course
was fully documented on the web, the transfer went without a hitch.

Teaching webs, in other words, are movable objects. Since they consist
of many small, but hyperlinked components, they are easy to update. Lecture
notes on paper are usually highly personal. Teaching from another teacher`s
notes is rare – and would probably be extremely frustrating. But on the
web, notes are written with an audience in mind. If a course web is well
designed, with a clear structure and good navigation tools, the whole
network of didactic texts can be reused by other people.

By that time, the technological environment had matured, and I decided
to take a bigger leap into the unknown. In the autumn of 2000 I abandoned
Word for FrontPage. From now on I would write web files rather than text
files, and publish on the web rather than on paper. The leap was not dangerous.
HTML files can (relatively) easily be converted to Word files – and vice
versa. I could always go back. But I have never regretted that particular
leap. Two years later I switched from FrontPage to the more powerful -
and more demanding – web editor DreamWeaver.

In the library management course we use the web as a teaching tool. During
the last seven years I have also taught web publishing
and web based teaching as subjects in their own right.
At Oslo University College we see a growing demand for further education
courses in these areas – from librarians, from teachers, and from other
professions in the cultural sector.

Our FE courses combine intense teaching periods on campus with on-going
web based upervision of project work. I have had no experience with pure
distance education, without face-to-face contact. I treat the web as a
support – almost as a partner – in tightly structured social encounters
with groups of students. This is likely to be the case for most teachers.
The web is brought into the physical learning space -
class rooms, libraries, workshops and lecture halls. Here, a wide range
of established practices hold sway. But if we accept it as a partner,
it will gradually modify our working routines and our understanding of
the learning process.

My encounter with the new teaching technology has been highly positive.
I started teaching mathematics – on a part time basis – more than forty
years ago. Since then I have tried out many educational tools. I have
concluded that teaching, as well as learning, is more a matter of attitude
than of technique. To the sincere student, says Confucius, every day is
a suitable day. The sincere teacher does not depend on technology. Aristotle
taught while he walked – in the cool garden of his friend Akademos. The
followers of Aristotle were called peripatetics – which
simply means “those who walk around”.

But that does not mean that teaching and technology are incompatible
entities. We live in societies where most of our work and most of our
leisure activities involve advanced technology. We interact with books
and electric light, with cars and electronic media, on a daily basis.
Education is no exception. We cannot conduct most of our teaching in gardens.
But educational technology has been reasonably stable for a long time.
Now, the rate of change accelerates.

Digital technology does not impose particular ways of teaching and learning.
In this field, directives come from the politicians. But technology allows,
invites or seduces us into change. Today, it is twelve years since I first
made a hyperlink of my own. It is seven years since I started to produce
teaching materials for the web. It is four years since I became a web
rather than a paper writer. It is two years since I started with DreamWeaver.
And I can see many steps ahead.

Stripped to the core, people can relate to technology in two ways. They
can follow the School of Descartes or the School of Sartre.

The Cartesians are cogitators. You should think about and discuss the
consequences of the new technology before you act. Attitude precedes technology.
Cartesians look before they leap. Essence precedes existence. The School
of Sartre is pragmatic. You should allow your experiences to shape your
thinking rather than vice versa. You should probe before you ponder. Technology
precedes attitude. Existentialists practice first and reflect afterwards.
Existence precedes essence.

As a web teacher, I still feel like a novice: 30% amateur, 40% dilettante
and 50% self-made man. I am not an absolute beginner anymore. The road
has taught me a trick or two. But I am certainly no expert. Many opportunities
remain untried and many roads untrodden. In such a young field it can
hardly be otherwise. If you want web teachers with twenty years of experience,
you must wait till 2020.

The impact of the web

Technology can not compensate for attitude. Ultimately, real education
must be limited to those who insist on learning (T. S. Eliot). This
is also true of the web. But I must add that the web is deeper, wider
and more surprising than any other tool or technique I have played with.
Time consuming administrative tasks – like messaging and hand-out production
- are simplified. The element of fun increases. But the main feeling is
one of space. There is so much more we can do, as teachers and as learners.
The limits and barriers to action recede. Our horizon expands.

The web is a mass medium, a group medium and a medium for personal communication
- at the same time. The participation barriers are low. I can produce
my web pages at home – or anywhere in the world – and still publish them
to the college web server. So can the students. Bringing the web into
teaching is not done overnight or in a single year. The process is better
described as a ladder with many separate rungs.

Politicians are happy to speak about the information society, full of
broadband connections and lifelong learning. They speak less about the
will, the persistence and the sheer hard work that is needed to climb
the ladder. When innovation requires new technology, many practical problems
must always be solved. Computers are complex beasts. The new equipment
must be selected, evaluated, financed and installed. When the tools are
in place, they must be supervised on a day-to-day basis. Service and support
is often left to the teacher. - It was your bloody idea, wasn`t it?

Students and teachers must learn to use new hardware and software. We
need to train ourselves before we can teach others. Maintenance and training
often comes on top of a full teaching load. There is also a cultural resistance
to change. Teaching institions tend to be conservative. The innovators
I know tell the same stories. Usually they have some support from above.
Management is positive – in principle. But the full innovation costs are
seldom covered. The institution may pay for a training course – if you
do the work in your own spare time. Colleagues tend to keep a low and
non-committed profile. New ways of teaching disturbs established practices.
Do not expect standing ovations as you stagger towards the goal posts.
At best you gain a diploma and a scattered applause. Benign neglect is
more likely.

The first five steps

In the mid nineties, when the story starts, our working environment was
already digital. There were PCs in every office. Local and global networks
were in place. And the rearguard fight against e-mail was clearly a lost
cause. Like all my colleagues, I had integrated word processing into my
daily routines. First we used WordPerfect – later we were all shepherded
into the MS Office Suite and switched to Word. The more adventurous teachers
experimented with Excel and PowerPoint. But while our writing tools were
digital, our products remained analogue: lecture notes on paper, stacks
of handouts, and transparent foils for ythe overhead projector. We still
lived in the world of Gutenberg. Below I describe the first five steps
on the ladder that leads to the web. In my case they cover the years from
1997 till 2002. I must add that step five was an important turning point.
At that stage I had to change my image of “the good teacher”.

Step 1 – administrative information

The first step was administrative. We used the web to distribute administrative
information to our students: curricula, reading lists, time schedules,
past exam questions, etc. Teaching went on as before. But some of the
dull and dreary routines that surround teaching were simplified.

This step is only possible, I would say, when students can consult the
web on a daily basis. If not, teachers must manage two production lines:
one on the web and one on paper. To be fully effective, it also requires
direct access to a web server. The teacher must be able to write, to publish
and to revise web documents. He or she must master at least a basic web
editor (like FrontPage Express) – or have access to the web through an
institutional publication system. To go through another person or department
makes the whole process inefficient and costly.

Since full scale web editors (like Dreamweaver) are rather more demanding
than word processors, many organizations are now turning to publication
systems instead. Such systems let people publish standard documents to
the web without knowledge of HTML, CSS or image processing. But they were
not available seven years ago.

Step 2 – subject information

In the next stage we started to use the web as a source of subject
information. In 1998-99 WWW was already rich in relevant materials
for library management. As a teacher I spent much time trawling the web
for case materials, policy documents and theoretical articles. Most of
it was in English. The students prefer materials in their own language.
But restricting the search to Norwegian sites would limit its potential
unduly.

The web is a global medium by its very nature. Our students are expected
to master English. Through the web we meet the international library world.
In terms of population, Norway is tiny – about the size of New Zealand.
For every single Norwegian there are a hundred native speakers of English:
we are outnumbered by a veritable flood of Americans, Englishmen, Canadians,
Australians, Scots and New Zealanders. The relative size of professional
communities must be rather similar: a hundred anglophone librarians for
every Norwegian one.

In Oslo, we have a decent library, with a broad range of publications
in English. In the management course, I always tried to include some English
language readings in the curriculum. But I find it much easier to trace
and select interesting materials through the web. Basic textbooks are
not a problem. But our students also need brief, clear, fresh and provocative
statements about the field today. Here the web excels.

Libraries tend to be rule-bound. There is no shortage of authorities
and final answers. Control is more available than creativity. I believe
library students must be exposed to conflicting opinions.
When authorities differ in public, they open up a space that allows other
people to think for themselves. The web tends to be strong where libraries
are weak: in the access to current documents and discussions.
Here we find policy papers, plans and proposals. The web is less formal
than print. Here people think aloud, argue and shout in CAPITAL letters.

The web is also a place where libraries present themselves and their
services. Paper documents offer a filtered reality. Editors put a screen
between us and the real world. As we all know, the real world is a jungle.
On the web we bypass the screen. Students can go on virtual trips, visiting
institutions in Norway and abroad. For me as a teacher, step 2 involved
surfing, mapping, evaluating, selecting and annotating a great variety
of web resources made by other people. A few of them were originally designed
for teaching, but most of them were created for other purposes, in other
contexts. The annotated links were published on the course web and integrated
into the curriculum, as readings, as places to visit (virtual tours), and
as supplementary material for students with special interests.

Step 3 – conversion

The third step involves web publication – in other words conversion
- of existing teaching materials. We start to use the web as a distribution
channel for our own writings. But we do not start from scratch. Any committed
teacher is surrounded by his own products. His shelves and drawers are
stacked – not only with printed books and articles – but with original
teaching notes, exercises, illustrations, student evaluations and all
the other paraphernalia that teaching generates. And every committed teacher
has the same dream: a time will come when everything will be put in its
right and proper place.

Step 3 is that time. Modern teaching involves complex interactions between
teachers, students, colleagues, administrators and innumerable pieces
of paper. As long as we deal with paper, our intellectual products can
only be ordered by heroic self-discipline. I admire – but cannot join
- those who rise to the occasion. But in step 3 we convert our existing
materials from paper to web. After conversion, we can clean out the drawers.
Our archives have finally been moved. They have not yet been structured,
ordered and categorized – that belongs to step 4. But they are ready for
the great day. On the web even ordinary people can put their notes in
order.

From a digital point of view, we are simply converting Word files into
HTML. But from a psychological point of view, conversion means that we
say goodbye to the world of paper and enter the world of the web. As an
activity, word processing is directed towards products on paper. We may
work on screens, but we plan for print-outs. The underlying digital files
are only vaguely present, like ghosts in the underworld. We remain attached
to the forms and traditions of paper objects. The printed document is
still experienced as the real thing.

Step 3 is a transitional stage, however. Files that are written for paper
bear the mark of their origin. The converted object is shaped by the logic
of paper. The full transition to the web occurs only when our texts are
designed for the new medium. Genuine web writing only develops when we
internalize the new medium. We must produce for the web.

Step 4 – Web writing

Once the files are on the web, we find ourselves in a different working
environment. As we learn more about the new medium, we discover that the
rules of the game have changed. Reading on the web differs from reading
on paper. Writing for the web is different from paper
writing. Here we are concerned with texts for teaching. In step 4 we start
to produce web documents specifically designed for learning in the new
medium.

Educational texts are tools rather than ends in themselves. As working
documents they serve as scripts and occasions and building blocks rather
than as objects of silent contemplation. Good teachers design and support
learning processes. Teachers using the web need to be educational designers.
Either we write web documents that promote active learning. Or we take
(parts from) existing documents and reframe them for learning purposes.

The move from step 3 to step 4 is bigger than most teachers realize.
The inner characteristics of the new medium are not visible at once. It
takes several years, in my experience, to understand the nature of the
new medium. On the computer screen, web documents look much like Word
documents. But web documents live in a faster and more transparent universe.

Word documents belong to the world of paper. They represent, it seems,
the final generation in the Gutenberg galaxy. But print on paper will
remain important for a long time yet. The recent shift from analogue to
digital printing does not matter. The modern world-system is deeply linked
to the technology of moveable types and multiple copies. As long as paper
objects remain important we belong to the world of Gutenberg.

Printed documents are only loosely coupled. They relate
to other printed documents through quotations and references. The web
of paper is real enough – and vast. But tracing the connections between
documents can easily take weeks and months and years. The house of science
is contructed out of such relationships. And scholars are accustomed to
this slow and stately pace. But students, politicians and the sensual
man-in-the-street must take the underlying scaffolding on faith.

In contrast, web documents are tightly coupled. They
relate to other web documents at the speed of light. Writing has always
had a double nature: deeply individual and deeply collective at the same
time. But when we write on paper, the collective nature of writing is
hidden. Paper is inherently private. Publication requires a major
effort. The web, on the contrary, is essentially a collective medium.
When we write to the web, we must struggle to avoid being
read.

The web medium, in other words, supports a high level of intertextuality.
Web readers and web writers have instant access to the whole web. This
changes the basic context of teaching and learning. On the open web I
can follow the activities of other teachers through their course sites.
Geography disappears. The web is a lateral medium. It allows constant,
real time awareness of what other teaching institutions are doing. I can
keep in touch with tools and trends and bright ideas from my own desk.
I can observe, reuse and transform what I find. Since I publish to the
web, I give as much as I get. The relationship is reciprocal. I am wired
to the world.

The same applies to my students. They can be exposed to a much wider
range of professional texts, cases and discussions. They can see what
other students in their field are creating. And I ask them to put their
own contributions on the web. They need not wait for formal approval.
It is helpful if drafts and other unfinished products are identified as
such. But I believe the learning process is supported by low barriers
to web publication. Quality is important, but the web as such cannot be
controlled. Web technology puts the power of print into the hands of the
general public. There it should remain. To support quality we should rather
develop quality mechanisms (“stamps of approval”) when and where
they are needed, inside the web itself.

Step 5 – Virtual learning

Step 5 starts from the fact that the web is ubiquitous. On the web we
produce teaching materials and create learning situations that can be
accessed from anywhere. The web is an interactive medium. We can create
virtual classrooms, where teachers and students use the web for all types
of learning activities. Virtual teaching may be combined with physical
teaching – or offered as an independent option to off-campus students.

As a teacher I found step 5 deeply challenging. So far I have not taken
the step into purely virtual teaching. But I had to accept the idea that
students could follow my classes without entering the class room. This
went against thirty-five years of conditioning. Teachers resemble actors:
the response from the audience is our greatest reward. It took a real
effort to abandon that idea. I did not stop teaching. But from now on
I also took care of the students who were absent. Through the web I made
it easier for them to continue their participation without turning up
in class. The rules of the game had shifted. I had to accept that people
could attend or work at home as they placed. This was really a new pedagogical
world. I was, one could say, competing against myself.

Traditional teaching activities revolves around the teacher – like planets
around the sun. Old-fashioned teachers constantly receive attention. Moving
to the web starts a Copernican revolution. The teacher no longer shines
in the middle. Now the web – or rather the network supported by the web
- moves into the center. We cut down on lecturing – no more strutting
and fretting upon the stage. Primadonnas exit to the left – while designers
and advisors enter from the right. It is a time for learning-oriented
web design, process design, and student supervision.

It is easy to argue for the change in retrospect. The web does not discriminate
between the physical audience on campus, the virtual audience elsewhere
- or random visitors from anywhere in the world. The library school attracts
mature students – including people who live far from Oslo. Many of them
are married and have children. Many – probably too many – have part-time
jobs. Some prefer to study on their own. Some would prefer not to study
at all. But they are all in my care.

The traditional lecture is a blunt teaching instrument: one size fits
all. Through the web we can start to design learning processes for all
creatures and conditions. It will not be easy and it will not go fast.
But the web will insist. If a book store like Amazon can adapt its services
to the particular needs of every single customer – so can universities.

Step 5 ends a tradition that has lasted for five hundred years. Medieval
university teaching was mainly oral. Modern university teaching combines
oral and written interaction. Lectures and discussions in the class room
are combined with books, articles and written assignments outside the
class. But web technology is able to handle both oral and written exchanges.

Full broadband interactivity is not in place yet. But this is a matter
of years rather than decades. In 2010 the average student and the average
teacher should be able to communicate digitally in real time, by text,
sound and moving image. I am not suggesting that class rooms, group rooms,
lecture halls and labs will disappear. But we will be more selective.
There will still be a campus. But I expect a much greater awareness of
function. We will still gather in physical space – but only when we need
to meet.

Digitale spørrekasser
De fleste referansespørsmål blir stilt av bibliotekets brukere mens de fysisk befinner seg på biblioteket. Men bibliotekene er normalt villige til å besvare spørsmål som kommer gjennom telefon, brev eller fax. E-post gir en fjerde mulighet. En digital spørrekasse er rett og slett en formalisering av denne muligheten: biblioteket sier seg villige til å besvare spørsmål ved hjelp av e-post.

Bibliotekarer har ofte drømt om å lagre spørsmål og svar, slik at de kunne utnytte sine erfaringer mer systematisk. Men de har sjelden tid til å skrive ned hva som foregår underveis. Straks vi tar e-post i bruk, åpner det seg nye perspektiver. E-postsystemene lagrer automatisk spørsmål og svar. De inviterer, så å si, til gjenbruk. Dersom spørsmål og svar legges i en database, kan bibliotekarene utnytte sitt tidligere arbeid. Dersom spørsmål og svar anonymiseres, kan databasen åpnes mot verdensveven. Da kan også brukerne utnytte tidligere svar.

De store nordiske landene har etablert nasjonale spørrekasser for folkebibliotekets brukere: BiblioteksVagten i Danmark, Fråga biblioteket i Sverige, Fråga bibliotekarien i Finland og Spør biblioteket i Norge. Men samtidig med bibliotekenes satsing har også andre institusjoner begynt å tilby slike tjenester. Både akademiske, pedagogiske og kommersielle fagmiljøer har fattet interesse for dette markedet.

Folkebibliotekenes nærmeste konkurrent er ikke betalingstjenestene, men de gratis opplysningstjenestene. Og den største utfordringen kommer fra de pedagogiske og de populærvitenskapelige tjenestene. Lærere og forskere er opptatt av læring og formidling. De har de samme målgrupper og de samme målsettinger som bibliotekene. Derfor er de både konkurrenter og mulige samarbeidspartnere.
Populærvitenskap og pedagogikk
Den største forskjellen er at bibliotekene tilbyr en generell tjeneste som tar i mot alle typer spørsmål, mens de faglige tjenestene er avgrenset til relevante spørsmål innenfor bestemte fagområder. Skillet går altså mellom generalister og spesialister. BiblioteksVagten gir opplysninger om 18 andre danske spørrekasser – og tre av disse dekker naturvitenskap. (Alle opplysninger gjelder mars 2002). Langt den største er Spørg Naturvidenskaben – Danmarks første elektroniske brevkasse for naturvidenskab og teknik. Denne tjenesten reklamerer med mere end 150 danske eksperter fra universiteter, forskningsinstitutioner mv..

I Norden har likevel svenskene kommet lengst i utbygningen av faglige spørrekasser. Fråga biblioteket henviser til spørrekasselisten Fråga en ekspert, som redigeres av Det svenske Skoldatanätet. Här hittar du experter inom olika ämnesområden som ställer upp och svarar på frågor från lärare och elever. Listen viser til over femti svenske tjenester med en populærvitenskapelig eller pedagogisk vinkling.

Norge er kommet kortere. Jeg har bare funnet sju populærvitenskapelige spørrekasser, og de fleste er ganske små. Den største spørrekassen drives av TV-programmet Schrødingers katt og dekker mange fagområder, men svarer bare på spørsmål i tilknytning til programmene. Det finnes store medisinske spørrekasser, men de er rettet mot et annet marked. Spør biblioteket har en liste over spørrekasser fra andre bibliotek, men henviser ikke til tjenester utenfor biblioteksektoren.

Den store overraskelsen på det norske markedet er pedagogikkprosjektet puggandplay. Dette vevstedet er knyttet til en serie undervisningsprogrammer fra norsk TV. Siden sendingene startet i september 2001 har det kommet inn nesten seks tusen spørsmål – altså ca. tusen spørsmål i måneden. Her kan norske skolebarn få svar på samme slags spørsmål som blir ivaretatt av Spørg Naturvidenskaben og av Fråga en ekspert-listen. Programmene presenterer norsk, matematikk og naturfag for skoleelever mellom 9 og 12 år.

Hver enkelt TV-sending genererer flere hundre spørsmål. Puggandplay klarer å håndtere denne spørsmålsmengden ved å benytte lærere og lærerstudenter (fra Høgskolen i Hedmark) som fageksperter. Det er altså norsk TV som står bak de viktigste satsingene på kunnskapsformidling gjennom spørsmål og svar i Norge.
Vitenskapelige spørsmål
For mange faglige spørsmål – spesielt fra barn og ungdom – kan de spesialiserte spørrekassene være et godt alternativ til bibliotekenes mer generelle tjenester. Og da er det interessant å se på hvordan spørsmålene blir besvart. Her er det en klar forskjell på de to miljøene.

1. Hej. Jeg vil gerne vide om det er rigtigt at solen på et tidspunkt vil komme for tæt på jorden eller de måske vil kolidere, hvis ja er der ca sat nogen tids alder der på.

På en vis måde ja, men det er Solen der i sin slutfase puster sig op og bliver så stor, at dens overflade formentlig vil række længere ud i rummet end den bane Jorden følger. Men det varer lidt endnu – måske 5 mia. år. (Spørg Naturvidenskaben, Danmark)

2. Hva er et lysår?

Et lysår er en lengdeenhet, lik den distanse lyset tilbakelegger i løpet av et år i det tomme rom. Dette blir ca 9 461 milliarder km. På samme måte bruker man lys-time, lys-minutt og lys-sekund. Avstanden til Månen er 1,3 lys-sekund, til Solen 8,3 lys-minutt, til Pluto 5½ lys-time. (Puggandplay, Norge)

3. Hvor stor er avstanden mellom jorden og solen? Hvor stor er avstanden mellom jorden og måne? Hvorfor er det nesten ingen kratere å se etter kometer som er krasjet på jorden?

Svaret består av pekere til 7 nettsider. (Spør biblioteket, Norge)

4. Vad kallas startpunkten för universum och när skedde den? Hur har forskarna kommit fram till detta? Vad är det som har avståndet 8 ljusminuter?

Marie Rådström skriver i sin bok ”Runt i rymden – till alla frågvisa” att ingen vet exakt hur universum har skapats, men de flesta astronomer anser att det startade med en sorts explosion, big-bang. Exakt tidpunkt är också svårt att fastställa, men astronomer anser att det borde vara för ca 10-15 miljarder år sedan. Du kan få reda på mer genom böckerna eller länkarna som följer nedan <utelatt>. Det finns även en service på nätet som heter ”Fråga astronomen” på följande adress: <utelatt> (Fråga biblioteket, Sverige)

Svar fra fagmiljøene går som oftest rett på sak og framstår som autoritative. De som svarer er trygge på sin respons. Svar fra bibliotekene er ofte mer forsiktige. Brukeren blir hyppigere henvist til bøker og nettsider om emnet. De må altså gå en runde til for å komme fram til svaret.
Vitenskap og humaniora
Stilt overfor tekniske og naturvitenskapelige spørsmål vil mange bibliotekarer svare at de ikke er spesialister. Det er ikke deres oppgave å gi faktiske svar på slike henvendelser. Jeg forventer ikke at folkebibliotekarer skal være spesialister på astronomi, biologi og ingeniørfag. Men jeg synes å merke at bibliotekarene opptrer sikrere og mer autoritativt på andre fagområder: kunst, historie, geografi, litteratur. De er ikke hjelpeløse i sin alminnelighet. Det er naturvitenskap og teknikk som volder besvær – ikke fagkunnskap i og for seg.

5. Jag undrar om ni vet när Shakespeares far dog? Någonstans läste jag att han nyss dött när Shakespeare skrev Hamlet.

William Shakespeares far John dog 1601. I kyrkboken för Holy Trinity i Stratford noterades 8 september 1601 begravningen av ”Mr. Johannes Shakespeare”. Hans mor, Mary Arden, dog 1608. ’Hamlet’ skrevs förmodligen 1601, även om det finns en viss osäkerhet om det exakta årtalet, uppgifter talar om perioden 1599-1601. Förövrigt dog Williams och Anne Hathaways son Hamnet 1596. … (Fråga biblioteket)

6. En norsk kommune er i besittelse av en del keramikk/porselensgjenstander. Disse er merket med en krone over stor N. Hvilken fabrikk er dette?

I Håndbok for porcelænsamlere (1977, s. 157-158) finner jeg flere porselensmerker som passer til denne beskrivelsen: Neapel og Doccia, Italia og Volkstedt-Rudolstadt, Tyskland. Det er imidlertid markante forskjeller mellom disse merkene. Jeg vil foreslå at dere sammenligner med illustrasjonene i den nevnte boken: Håndbok for porcelænsamlere / Ole Hæstrup. – København : Lademann, 1977. … (Spør biblioteket).

Slike spørsmål turneres elegant, mens helt elementære fakta i astronomi – at avstanden mellom jorda og sola er 8 lysminutter = 150 millioner km – virker utilgjengelige.
Konklusjon
Disse inntrykkene får jeg bekreftet ved mer systematiske analyser av spørsmål og svar. Samtidig ser vi at det vokser fram tilbud som kan erstatte biblioteket på mange fagområder – spesielt innenfor naturvitenskap. Disse tjenestene gir autoritative og umiddelbare svar – og har forøvrig ofte brukervennlige systemer for browsing og gjennfinning i spørsmålsarkivene.

Skillet er ikke skarpt. Bibliotekene kan også gi gode faktiske opplysninger, mens de faglige tjenestene også kan henvise videre. Men tendensen er klar. Folkebibliotekene er preget av en humanistisk kultur. Dette slår også ut i referansearbeidet. Brukere som stiller tekniske og naturvitenskapelige spørsmål, får lengre vei til svarene enn de som stiller spørsmål innenfor en bred humanistisk kultur.

Utfordringen er tydelig. Spør biblioteket besvarer 3-4 tusen spørsmål i året, eller 10-12 spørsmål pr. dag. Ca. 1/3 av spørsmålene – altså 3-4 spørsmål om dagen – kommer fra skoleelever. Puggandplay håndterer det tidobbelte – men tjenesten forsvinner når programmene slutter.

Hva bør bibliotekene gjøre? Fortsette som før? Henvise brukere til de faglige tilbudene? Eller sørge for teknisk og sosial integrasjon med spesialistene – med felles grensesnitt og felles kunnskapsbaser? Den eneste som kan svare på dette spørsmålet er den jevne alminnelige bruker. Hvis de skifter kunnskapsleverandør, bør bibliotekene ta signalet på alvor. Vi har ikke monopol på gratis folkeopplysning.

Sammendrag

Artikkelen tar utgangspunkt i ett hundre spørsmål som ble stilt ved skranken (eller telefonisk) til lesesalen på Deichmanske bibliotek i løpet av et par uker tidlig på sommeren 1997. Hensikten med undersøkelsen er å få et tallmessig bilde av de spørsmål som blir stilt til referansetjenesten i et norsk folkebibliotek – og å vurdere i hvilken grad spørsmålene kan besvares ved å bruke nettressurser.

I 1997 fant veven svaret i 49% av tilfellene. Da spørsmålene ble prøvd ut igjen i 1999, hadde treffraten steget til 61%. Spørsmål om norske forhold skilte seg ut. Veven er minst effektiv for de 47 spørsmålene som angår norske forhold (36% treff på veven i 1999), spesielt når de dreier seg om bestemte opplysninger, dokumenter eller bilder (29%) eller er av historisk karakter (25% treff).

Veven fungerte langt bedre for spørsmål som ikke er knyttet til Norge (81%), for emnesøk (77%) og for spørsmål om aktuelle forhold (70%) . Kombinasjoner av disse faktorene gir svært gode resultater, med treffrater på nesten 90%.

Innledning

Referansetjenesten er en av folkebibliotekets sentrale tjenester, og arbeidet med de konkrete referansespørsmålene er selve kjernen i denne tjenesten. Men vi har forbausende lite systematisk informasjon om referansearbeid.

Tønsbergprosjektet var det første større prosjekt om referansearbeid i Norge – og ga
banebrytende resultater om referansearbeidets kvalitet. Det viste med all ønskelig tydelighet behovet for kvalitetssikring. Men dette var et engangsprosjekt. For å utvikle og kvalitetssikre en publikumstjeneste er det nødvendig å drive løpende innsamling og vurdering av relevante data. Hvis ikke det gjøres, vil de ubehagelige prosjektresultatene raskt drukne i hverdagens krav.

Foreløpig er det slik at selv de enkleste tellinger – av antall henvendelser – foretas ganske tilfeldig. Erfarne bibliotekarer vet selvsagt mye om hvilke spørsmål publikum stiller i deres bibliotek. Men vi har svært lite kvantitativ kunnskap. Hvordan fordeler spørsmålene seg på ulike spørsmålstyper – som spørsmål etter emner, på den ene siden, og konkrete opplysninger, på den andre? Hvor mange spørsmål kommer fra skole-elever og studenter? Hvor mange dreier seg om offentlig styre og stell? Hvor mange springer ut av hobbyer og fritidsinteresser?

Vi vet ennå mindre om hvordan henvendelsene blir håndtert. Hvor lang tid tar det – i gjennomsnitt – å besvare et spørsmål? Hvor mange kan besvares raskt – på 2-3 minutter? Hvor mange krever mye arbeid – la oss si et kvarter eller mer? Finnes det faste rutiner for å gå videre med ubesvarte spørsmål? Hvor mye tid tar referansearbeidet i alt? Hva koster det? Blir ressursene anvendt fornuftig?

Denne uvitenheten er ikke spesiell for Norge. Også i andre land er innholdet i det løpende referansearbeidet nærmest ukjent. Helt grunnleggende data for effektiv planlegging og utvikling av tjenesten mangler.

Hensikten med den lille undersøkelsen som er presentert her, er dels å få et visst bilde av referansestrømmen – altså alle de spørsmål som løpende blir stilt til referansetjenesten i et norsk folkebibliotek – og dels å vurdere i hvilken grad spørsmålene kan besvares ved å bruke nettressurser. Kunnskap om referansestrømmen kan bidra til bedre planlegging av referansetjenestene. Kunnskap om nettet kan bidra til å styrke referansetjenesten i små bibliotek. Jeg håper å kunne videreføre arbeidet i større målestokk på et senere tidspunkt.

I artikkelen tar jeg utgangspunkt i ett hundre spørsmål som ble stilt ved skranken (eller telefonisk) til lesesalen på Deichmanske bibliotek i løpet av et par uker tidlig på sommeren 1997. Gå til href=”#Alle spørsmålene”>Alle spørsmålene for en fullstendig liste. Fra Sankthans fikk jeg lov til å hospitere to uker på lesesalen, og spørsmålene ble – med god hjelp fra staben – registrert i tilknytning til denne praksisperioden. Skranken ved lesesalen er en sentral ressurs for referansearbeid i folkebiblioteksektoren. Hovedbiblioteket ved Deichman har både den største referansesamlingen og det største referansestaben i folkebiblioteksektoren. Skranken tar både mot spørsmål direkte fra brukerne (førstelinjetjeneste), spørsmål fra filialene (annenlinjetjeneste) og spørsmål fra bibliotek ellers i landet (tredjelinjetjeneste).

I oktober 1997 åpnet Deichmanske bibliotek for
href=”http://nyhuus.deich.folkebibl.no/deichman/spor.html”>spørsmål over Internett. Denne elektroniske spørrekassen har senere blitt knyttet til det nye kulturnettet og eksplisitt blitt åpnet for henvendelser fra hele landet. Spørsmål og svar blir arkivert – og det er rimelig til å tro at dette arkivet etter hvert vil bli en viktig ressurs for alle som søker etter svar på referansespørsmål. Arkivmaterialet vil også gjøre det langt lettere å analysere referansestrømmene i framtida. Allerede nå legger Deichmanske bibliotek
href=”http://nyhuus.deich.folkebibl.no/deichman/SPOR/nokkeltall.html”>nøkkeltall om spørretjenesten ut på nettet.

Nettet vil i det hele tatt føre til dype endringer i referansearbeidet. Bibliotekene og brukerne vil bli mindre avhengige av trykte referansesamlinger. Det vil også bli lettere for brukerne å benytte kildene hjemmefra – eller fra arbeidsplassen. Hvis de har grunnleggende søkeferdigheter, kan de klare mye på egen hånd. Og hvis de trenger hjelp, kan de jo henvende seg til bibliotekene via nettet.

Små lokale bibliotek vil få langt større adgang til kildene enn tidligere. Nettet gjør det også mulig å utvikle et tett samarbeid om referansevirksomheten. Det er lett å forestille seg en nettsentrert referansetjeneste for hele Norge, der alle folkebibliotekene – og gjerne også fagbibliotekene – går sammen om å besvare spørsmålene publikum sender inn. En slik tjeneste er forøvrig allerede etablert i Storbritannia.

Mine data stammer derfor fra en overgangsperiode. Mange av svarene fantes allerede på veven, selv om henvendelsene kom gjennom de tradisjonelle
kanalene.

Datainnsamling

Materialet omfatter en betydelig del av de noe mer krevende referansespørsmål som ble stilt i en to ukers periode. Men jeg gjør oppmerlsom på at dataene ikke tilfredstiller strenge metodiske krav til innsamlingsprosedyre. Jeg arbeidet som praktikant – ikke som forsker – i den aktuelle perioden. Men det tette og gode samarbeidet i referansetjenesten gjorde at jeg fikk god kontakt med referansestrømmen.

Registreringen skjedde på flere måter. Noen spørsmål forelå altså skriftlig, som brev eller faks. Telefoniske spørsmål ble notert på lapper av den som tok telefonen, men ble ofte sendt videre til andre. Jeg noterte mange av de spørsmålene jeg selv arbeidet med og fikk informasjon fra mine kolleger om hvilke spørsmål de hadde mottatt i løpet av dagen. Jeg tror derfor materialet gir et realistisk bilde av referansearbeidets innhold ved et stort norsk folkebibliotek.

Dersom materialet er representativt, er det også av verdi å undersøke i hvilken grad de kan besvares bare med hjelp av Internett. De fleste spørsmålene ble opprinnelig besvart uten bruk av Internett. Med en erfaren stab og en stor trykt referansesamling for hånden var det liten grunn til å legge hovedvekten på nettressursene. Senere på sommeren 1997 gikk jeg imidlertid gjennom alle spørsmålene og prøvde å besvare dem med Internett som eneste hjelpemiddel.

Jeg kan ikke garantere at jeg fant alle mulige vevsvar, men jeg brukte mye tid – opp til en time – på alle spørsmål der det var en viss sjanse for å finne et svar på veven. Sommeren 1999 gikk jeg gjennom materialet på nytt og sjekket hvor mange spørsmål som nå kunne besvares. For noen av spørsmålene ga veven ufullstendige svar. Jeg har regnet to ufullstendige svar som ekvivalent med ett fullstendig svar. I det følgende bruker jeg data fra 1999.

Resultatet for hele materialet under ett var:

• I 1997 kunne 49% av spørsmålene besvares ved hjelp av veven
• I 1999 kunne 61% av spørsmålene besvares.

Skulle det fortsette slik, med en forbedring på 6% hvert år, ville vi klare oss helt uten trykte oppslagsverk etter år 2006 …. . Men fullt så enkelt blir det ikke. Vevens treffsikkerhet – altså dens evne til å gi svar – varierer mye med hvilken type spørsmål det er snakk om.

Norge og verden
Noen fag og emner er utpreget internasjonale. Naturvitenskapene er det mest nærliggende eksempelet. Det finnes norske astronomer, kjemikere og medisinere; men det finnes ingen særegen norsk kjemi. Planetene, grunnstoffene eller symptomene er globale. På slike områder kan vi benytte kunnskaper – og dermed kunnskapskilder – fra hele verden

Andre fag og emner er mer stedbundne. Det er først og fremst norske fagfolk som studerer norsk geografi, språk og historie – og norsk lokalhistorie blir nesten bare utforsket av de som er bosatt i området – eller som er betalt av kommunestyret for å gjøre jobben.

Dette er en viktig dimensjon i referansearbeidet. I hvilken grad er spørsmålene så knyttet til Norge at de må besvares ved hjelp av norske kilder? I hvilken grad er de knyttet til bestemte andre land? Og i hvilken grad er de uavhengige av sted?

Nesten halvparten av spørsmålene (47%) gjelder altså norske forhold. Disse kan sjelden besvares med internasjonale oppslagsverk og andre internasjonale kilder. De norske spørsmålene synes også å være mer spesifikke – og dermed vanskeligere – enn de øvrige. Vi ser dette tydeligere hvis vi konstruerer et sett analoge spørsmål. Disse er kursivert i Tabell 2.

De analoge norske spørsmålene – om bevingede ord og telefonkatalogen – blir svært enkle. De analoge utenlandske spørsmålene – om den engelske landeveisrøveren Dick Turpin og om amerikanske taler fra nasjonaldagen – blir svært krevende.

Skillet mellom norske og øvrige spørsmål slår meget sterkt ut på veven. I 1999 kunne de aller fleste “ikke-norske” spørsmålene (81%) besvares via Internett – mot bare 36% av de norske spørsmålene. Dette skyldes delvis at den norske delen av Internett ikke er fullt så utviklet som den engelskspråklige. På de fleste områder ligger vi et år eller to etter USA. Men det skyldes nok også at de norske spørsmålene i utgangspunktet er mer krevende. De enkle spørsmålene om norske forhold havner ikke på Deichmans bord. De klarer brukerne å løse lokalt. Derimot trenger vi hjelp med enkle spørsmål om utenlandske forhold – siden vi mangler lokalkunnskap om faktiske forhold i Storbritannia eller USA.

Fortid og nåtid

Veven er et nytt medium, og innholdet er nåtidsorientert. I de første årene av verdensvevens historie var det først og fremst aktuell informasjon som ble publisert. Høsten 1995 prøvde Koutnik (1997) å besvare 104 tilfeldig valgte spørsmål fra Slavens (1994) ved bare å bruke WWW. Han fant tilfredstillende svar på 32% av spørsmålene. Veven ga den gangen langt bedre resultater for aktuell (46%) enn for historisk informasjon (17%).

I vårt materiale gjaldt to tredjedeler av spørsmålene (67%) aktuelle forhold – definert som de siste ti årene (1987-97). En knapp tredjedel gjaldt forhold før 1987. Tre spørsmål kunne ikke plasseres (fordi vi ikke visste svaret).

Historisk informasjon blir i økende grad lagt ut på nettet. Vi kan regne med at alle mye brukte kilder etter hvert vil foreligge i digital form. Men digitaliseringen vil ta
lang tid. En rekke store prosjekter er i gang, og noen har også gitt synlige resultater. Her ligger Norge langt framme, med store tiltak som
href=”http://www.dokpro.uio.no/”>Dokumentasjonsprosjektet (avsluttet 31.12.97) og href=”http://www.nbr.no/galnor/”>Galleri Nor.

Men veven er fortsatt sterkest når det gjelder nyere informasjon. I vårt materiale kunne de aktuelle referansespørsmålene besvares digitalt i 70% av tilfellene, mens de historiske spørsmålene hadde 45% treff. Hvis vi kombinerer tid og sted, blir bildet ennå klarere. Vevens treffsikkerhet er høyest for aktuelle spørsmål som ikke er knyttet til Norge – og lavest for historiske norske spørsmål.

Spørsmålstyper

Det foreligger få undersøkelser av innholdet i referansestrømmene (men se Britiske studier). Det finnes heller ingen faste regler for å dele inn henvendelsene i undergrupper eller operative kategorier – med tanke på hvordan de best skal håndteres. I det foreliggende materialet har jeg foretatt en grov inndeling i fire grupper.

• Emnesøk – altså søk der brukeren var på jakt etter informasjon om et nærmere avgrenset tema eller emne. Deichman er et folkebibliotek. Dette preger både brukersammensetningen, brukernes forventninger og bibliotekets muligheter til å gi fyldestgjørende svar. Avanserte emnesøk av vitenskapelig eller teknisk karakter er det naturlig å henvise til fagbibliotek på området. Disse søkene var normalt ganske generelle - eller uspesialiserte – emnesøk.
• Faktasøk – altså søk der brukeren var på jakt etter konkrete opplysninger.
• Dokumentsøk – altså søk der brukeren ønsket spesifiserte tekster eller dokumenter.
• Bildesøk – altså søk der brukeren ønsket grafisk materiale, som bilder, foto, illustrasjoner, eller kart.

Emnesøkene dominerer, med litt over halvparten av alle henvendelsene. Men det er de øvrige spørsmålstypene – etter konkrete opplysninger, spesifikke dokumenter eller spesifiserte bilder – som i særlig grad er knyttet til norske forhold (Tabell 6).

Vi har sett at veven fungerer dårligst for norske spørsmål. Det er derfor lite forbausende at veven gir best resultater for emnesøk, som i mindre grad er knyttet til Norge, og lavere treff for fakta-, dokument- og bildesøk. Treffprosentene (1999) er de følgende: emnesøk – 77%, faktasøk – 43%, dokumentsøk – 35%, bildesøk – 50%.

I de tre siste gruppene er basistallene ganske lave. Hovedkonklusjonen må derfor bli:

• de fleste spørsmål knyttet til emner – kanskje 75% – kan besvares ved hjelp av veven
• atskillig færre – kanskje rundt 40% – av de øvrige spørsmålstypene (fakta, dokument, bilde) kan besvares

Forskjellen skyldes ikke bare skillet mellom norske og ikke-norske spørsmål. I begge gruppene ligger treffraten for emnesøk ca. 20% over treffraten for andre typer søk (Tabell 8).

Konklusjon

I dette materialet fungerer klart veven best for spørsmål som ikke er knyttet til Norge, for emnesøk og for spørsmål om aktuelle forhold. Kombinasjoner av disse faktorene gir spesielt gode resultater. “Utenfor” Norge har både emnesøk og aktuelle spørsmål treffrater på nesten 90%. Veven er minst anvendbar for spørsmål som angår norske forhold (36% treff), spesielt når de dreier seg om bestemte opplysninger, dokumenter eller bilder (29%) – eller er av historisk karakter (25%).

Hvorfor er det slik? Den viktigste forklaringen er at veven ikke vokser jevnt. For eksempel er bibliografiske data om bøker – fra bibliotek og bokhandler – meget
godt dekket. Det biografiske materialet på veven er langt svakere. Når det gjelder
spillefilmer, har Internet Movie Database enestående god dekning av filmografiske
opplysninger. Informasjonen om verselinjer fra dikt – et populært tema for spørsmål – er svært ujevn. Noe ligger åpent på veven. Noe må hentes fram fra databaser – som Deichmans diktdatabase og Perseus (for gresk diktning og kultur). Noe er tilgjengelig mot betaling – på dyre CD-plater (English Poetry ..). Og mye – det meste – finnes bare i trykt form.

Slik kan vi gå gjennom emne etter emne.

Dette betyr at vi trenger en dobbelt satsing. Bibliotekarer og brukere bør lære å bruke veven på områder der den allerede er meget effektiv – det vil si utenfor Norges grenser. Dette vil spesielt være nyttig i bibliotek med små referansesamlinger. Opplæringen i vevsøk kan gjerne skje i lærerstyrte situasjonener – innenfor vanlig undervisning eller i form av spesialsydde kurs. Men ser vi på kostnadene, vil det mest effektive bidrag til søkeferdighetene antagelig være vevbaserte opplegg, som både kan tilpasses ulike brukergrupper og holdes løpende oppdatert.

Samtidig bør både bibliotekene, og andre undervisnings- og kulturinstitusjoner, gjøre norske ressurser – med tilhørende gjenfinningsverktøy – tilgjengelige på veven. Vi har allerede god adgang til relevante globale ressurser på veven. Hvis vi samtidig – møysommelig – må søke fram de norske kildene i trykt form, blir det lett å spå om framtida. Læring er en form for arbeid. I sin læring vil de fleste studenter, elever og andre kunnskapssøkende mennesker velge den raskeste veien til målet. Og dersom læringsarbeidet går fortere og lettere utenfor Norges grenser, vil de globale kildene i økende grad dominere både spørsmål og svar.

***

Referanser (uferdig)

• Analyse av nøkkeltall fra Deichmanske bibliotek.
• Tall fra britiske studier
• Vevsøk: starthjelp
• Høivik, Tord and Helge Høivik. Hvordan reagerer salt med svovel? Brukernes vurderinger av referansetjenesten i norske folkebibliotek. Tønsberg: Tønsberg bibliotek, 1995. (= Prosjektet “Biblioteket finner svaret”. Rapport nr. 2).
• Høivik, Tord. Sink, swim or surf: The future of reference work in Norwegian public libraries. Paper for 2nd British-Nordic Conference on Library and Information Science, Edinburgh, April 24-26, 1997. HTML.
• Høivik, Tord. Veven som leksikon
• Koutnik, Chuck. The World Wide web is here: is the end of printed reference sources near? RQ, nr. 3 (vår) 1997, s. 422-425.
• Slavens, Thomas P. Reference interviews, questions and materials, 3rd ed.
  Methuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1994.

Revidert 5.7.99

Ansvarlig: Tord Høivik

Catalogues or customers

Traditionally, libraries have distinguished between internal, or preparatory operations, which deal with the accession and description of library materials; and external, or public directed operations, which deliver the materials, or provide the answers, that the users demand.

Both functions are, of course, essential to the work of the library. In the profession there has, however, been a tendency to value the “internal” tasks of cataloguing, classification and indexing more highly than the “external” tasks of dissemination and reference work. The physical – or digital – catalogue has, in particular, been seen as the core technology of the library, and as the ultimate test of the librarian`s professional skills.

Vast resources are invested in describing documents. The intellectual and clerical work involved in cataloguing is both time-consuming and mentally demanding. Rough calculations suggest that integrating a new book into a collection costs – on the average – as much as the book itself. The profession is continually updating its descriptive procedures (AACR, Dewey, LCSH, …) and its systems for sharing descriptive information (MARC, union catalogues, networked databases). One may argue that the systems themselves, because of great advances in our understanding of modelling or representation, need to be reconstructed along new lines. But few doubt that resource description will remain a prominent part of the librarian` s professional role.

Reference work, by contrast, is much less professionalized or codified. Reference service is still seen as a central component in the work of libraries. Librarians are trained, and often very well trained, in the practical art of reference. But this centrality has not been translated into highly developed networks, rules, or theories. In public libraries, reference has remained a small scale, localized craft – very different from the mighty institutions that underpin document description and the catalogue. And here I agree with the Norwegian Director of Public Libraries, who recently stated: generally we know too little about what libraries do. In our professional debate we have been very occupied with the tools, and much less with the user. (Langeland, 1995, p. 37).

Librarians or documentalists

Why is this so? Why did the inner work of document organization achieve higher professional status than the outer work of responding to the queries of library customers? We can at least state that there is a certain tension between those who emphasize the role of the catalogue and those who emphasize the role of customer service. In her Ph.D. thesis Lena Olsson (1995) describes in fascinating detail the decade-long struggle between catalogue-oriented librarians and customer-oriented documentalists in the design and building of Sweden`s first automated national catalogue LIBRIS. The tug of war went to the heart of the profession.

Documentalists and special librarians followed the scientific practices of the technical and medical colleges while the generalists followed the humanistic tradition of cultivating the individual. The documentalists tried to focus on information content in, e.g., journal articles, and to utilize modern methods of information transfer. Thus they turned away from the traditional library, while the librarians remained attached to the library as a particular space and to the organizing and describing of monographs. The struggle of the documentalists was a first step towards abstracting library from book to information (p. 233-234, my translation).

This particular struggle involved the great research libraries rather than the public library sector. The academic libraries are institutions of scholarly learning rather than institutes of popular education. They carry the weight of centuries, while the public libraries are much more recent. But the polarity is the same, and has to do with the nature of the relationship between libraries and customers.

All librarians agree that libraries exist in order to serve a public, be they scholars, students, or the general crowd. All librarians agree that individual customers should be served with warmth, diligence and skill. These norms are not always realized in library practice, but they are realized more often than not. My personal experience of the library world is very positive, and is confirmed by numerous surveys of library users: individual librarians are generally courteous, amiable and helpful beyond the call of duty.

But the customer orientation has not been implemented at the structural level. While most librarians are user-friendly, most library systems are not. The inner world of librarianship – as symbolized by the catalogue – is ruled by the profession. Librarians would prefer to adapt the users to the systems – which means user education – rather than adapting the systems to the users. And here there is no great difference between public and professional, libraries. The LIBRIS struggle had to do with systems design – or the infrastructure of customer service. And at the level of design, librarians have not been overly user-oriented – at least not towards current users.

The traditional card catalogue emerged as a tool of scholarly humanistic research. It served the needs of research communities focused on the intense study of books. And the scholar`s catalogue maintained its dominance at the centre of the profession even while other groups of users appeared. The more technical professions – by which I mean science, technology and medicine – had much more need of current journal articles and reports. The social sciences required a combination of classical books, professional articles and current sources of social information. What the business world really wanted to know was the future, but it had to settle for news items and strategic analyses. And the general public – more often than not – asked for entertainment – and was offered edification …

The professional publics had sufficient purchasing power to organize their own technical libraries and documentation centers. They were able to build alternative information institutions, uncumbered by visions of Greek pillars and grandiose catalogues. The British Library Lending Division at Boston Spa – which was bulldozed through by a chemical engineer; United Microfilms International – originaly constructed around the technologies of xeroxing and microfilm; and the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia – created by the formidable Mr. Garfield, are information institutions designed with today`s customers in mind. From Norway, I would like to add the National Library division in Rana – a former steel mill town on the West coast – where several hundred employees – led by a former politician without library training – are storing, cataloguing, microfilming, and digitalizing the full range of recordable media published in Norway.

The general public had no comparable way of channelling its interests and concerns. As a general rule, organizations develop most rapidly if they are challenged from the outside – by customers or competitors. Public libraries have not faced an organized public, and are unaccustomed to the give-and-take of strong debate. Libraries are, in any case, best known for their reading and lending facilities. To the general public, reference service remains the least known and most obscure component of library work.

This is beginning to change, however – mainly because our public libraries are becoming more important as educational institutions. The number of external students in higher education is growing, new teaching plans stress independent, resource-based study, and local libraries are seen as vital in the coming, major reform of adult education. During 1992-1996 a large-scale project was carried out in order to improve the quality – and also the visibility – of reference in Norwegian public libraries. And the results surprised the library community.

Reference quality

Information was gathered, as in many similar British and US studies, by simulating an ordinary user. In a survey of 49 public libraries in 1993, a set of reference questions of medium difficulty were presented to the reference desk. In all cases the staff faced a pleasant middle-aged lady who had five questions about whaling and one about hunting:

Since I am here anyhow, I wondered whether it is legal to shoot badgers, and if so – when? My parents have been sorely disturbed by a badger in the garden the whole summer and in the autumn as well. The animal opens the garbage bin and spreads garbage all around.

The overall conclusion was dismal: the chance of getting a satisfactory answer was less than 30% (Salvesen, 1994). The last question caught people`s attention – perhaps because wrong answers could lead to unpleasant encounters with the law – so the final report was nicknamed the Badger Report. The correct answer, if you are so inclined, is that you may shoot Norwegian badgers with impunity throughout the autumn – in fact from August 28 and January 31.

This project was inspired by a Danish student project carried out in 1984 and published in 1987 (Elkær Hansen, 1987). It prompted, in its turn, a Swedish study using the same methodology. Neither of these studies, in three Scandinavian countries with strong public library traditions, were encouraging to those who promote the library as a community information centre.

The percentages lie well below the international “norm”: that libraries both public and academic tend to have a success rate around 55%. In the US, observations in the 50-60% interval have occurred so frequently that researchers speak of a “fifty-five percent rule”. It is worth stressing that academic libraries are no exception – though the number of surveys is limited. With this in mind, we should probably be happy libraries do not run airlines…

Library responses
Quality testing has no meaning unless it leads to quality improvement. The library school teacher who supervised the 1984 study, reported that the Danish library community was shocked by the findings – but did not act on them (Johannsen, 1994). Reference quality was defined as a problem for the staff of the reading room – not as a concern of the leadership or the organization as a whole. But he adds that “today, the situation has changed in comparison with the mid-eighties. There is more focus on users and user needs”.

The Norwegian library community was equally shocked. The project was the first professional, large-scale empirical study of service quality in Norway – and the results were hard to disregard. Some argued, however, that the staff on duty might have been library assistants rather than librarians proper. A follow-up study of staffing routines revealed that this was not the case. In the libraries studied the reference desk was normally staffed by professional librarians rather than assistants (Salvesen, 1996).

The authors of the badger report concluded that the quality of reference service in Norwegian public libraries is not professionally acceptable. This applies to the provision of simple factual answers, or ready reference. But there is little reason to believe that other types of reference work would have fared any better.

Our confidential customer also took notes on the more qualitative aspects of service behavior. These have not been systematically analyzed. But the information does say more about reference behavior in general – and points to areas where quality improvement might be possible.

As in Denmark the study showed great differences between libraries. In some places that staff would do anything to help us. In other libraries we felt like intruders.…

Service quality was not highly correlated with size or resources. In busy libraries, staff might do their utmost. In quiet libraries, interest in the customer could still be low.

We have the strong impression that very few utilized the reference interview in order to plan an efficient search. Only one library asked us why we needed the information, and nobody asked whether we knew foreign languages. Reference works in English were automatically offered.

The lack of professional reference interviewing was also notable in a Scottish study, carried out by students from Aberdeen (Head, 1993). Fifteen libraries were approached with the same question – about the Scottish author and traveler Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who had just crossed the Antarctica on foot and unsupported.. Only one library tried to conduct an interview. As in Norway, the librarians showed no interest in the customer`s situation. They charged into reference action without knowing the intended use of the information, the user`s level of education, or the user`s previous knowledge about the topic.

In Norway, the immediate reaction of the Director of Public Libraries was the following: I will not conclude that quality was poor, because quality must be measured against the expectations of the public. There are probably few people who expect to get answers to this type of question in public libraries. … I believe that the public never will ask many questions of this nature. Answering such questions does not become part of the routine, at least not in small and medium-sized libraries. And many find it difficult to tackle problems outside their daily routines

Which may well be the case. But Langeland (1994) also stated that reference work is one of the core functions of the public library. Libraries should be able to tackle uncommon questions. But smaller libraries would need the support of larger central libraries – with more information resources – and a greater range of questions in their daily work. Norwegian public libraries need, in other words, a second line reference service.

One of the more impressive efforts to raise reference quality in recent years comes from Maryland, USA. Here, the Division of Library Development and Services (under the local Department of Education) tested sixty public libraries in 1983. The 55%-rule was fully confirmed (Dyson, 1992). They also determined that the main causal factor was communication. Collection size, staff size, time pressure and the amount of time spent on each query had hardly any influence on the quality of the answer.

Library authorities in Maryland developed a three day communication training course and trained more than two hundred of their reference librarians. A follow-up study showed that librarians who had attended the course got substantially better reference results than non-attenders (Larson, 1994).

Reports from the field

Challenged by the badger report, and inspired by Maryland, I developed a two day training course in reference interviewing in 1994. This course has now been conducted six times, with approximately eighty participants – mainly women – in various regions of Norway. Both librarians and library assistants have attended.

In the workshops I could recognize many of the problems identified by Scandinavian, British and US researchers. The participants did have a tendency to rush into action – and to take a leading rather than a guiding role in the search process. They did need to consider communication as a set of professional skills rather than an idiosyncratic personal attribute. And they definitely needed to explore the context of many queries more fully than they were accustomed to. But my experience has also been that improved interviewing techniques, while valuable and important, are far from being the whole answer.

Crowd control

Beyond the reference interview as such, participants brought up three main barriers to efficient reference work. The first was how to handle the “difficult” customer – which shaded into the more general problem of dealing with several competing customers at the same time. Parents with small children will know what I mean.

We used socio-drama techniques to explore these problems – which I would call issues of customer management or crowd control. Participants worked together in small groups and designed a typical real-life scenario. Each group role-played its scenario in front of the others. We then analyzed the scenario together – and replayed it with different communication strategies, in order to experience the impact of communication on the flow of events.

The grumpy lady who rejected every suggestion for a book, the lonely lady who wanted to talk rather than read, and the impatient lady who just had to be served ahead of everybody else were stock figures. The chattering teams of teenagers sent forth by their (no doubt relieved) teacher – without further instructions and no warning to the librarian – to study African politics or the natural history of earthworms, were also recognized by everybody.

The problem parameters were similar, but the solutions were not. Our follow-up discussions were often heated. Participants differed greatly in their view of what librarians could or could not do. The lack of shared practical norms was obvious. Colleagues at the same library could have very different views on acceptable behavior. Many participants found it very hard to say no to a customer. They feared to be disliked. In the terminology of the Tavistock school (or socio-technic studies), I would say that their skills in boundary maintenance were low.

Organization

The second barrier was organizational. Reference work is one of the services offered by the library as an organization. Its quality depends on the social and material organization of the library – how things are done at the collective level. Issues like

• the physical placement of reference desks,
• the availability of quiet spaces for interviews, and
• the organization of a second line service for difficult queries

can not be resolved by training courses. They must be faced by the library leadership.

My impression is that there is much to gain – even within current budget constraints – in this area. But organizational change never comes easy. Libraries are not accustomed to take the lead in change processes. Like other stable public institutions – School, Church, Army, Railway – their organizational culture has traditionally looked towards the past and inward rather than towards the future and outward.

There are many dynamic leaders in the Norwegian library sector – and in small libraries a single leader may achieve much. But in the larger public libraries she or he must also have active support from the operational staff in order to move the organization. As the leader of Oslo Public Library – Liv Sæteren – once said: it feels like changing the course of a battle cruiser.

Money

The third barrier is economic. Change demands resources. But librarians are generally overworked and undervalued. Local governments fail to understand that public libraries are the very foundations of democracy. They contain our investment in knowledge. They are uniquely equipped to organize, retrieve and disseminate knowledge and cultural expressions. They are especially beneficial for children and youth, for parents, book readers, the unemployed, and retired people.

But for libraries to improve, politicians must first take budgetary action. If they would only focus on and invest in libraries. If only public authorities could recognize the fundamental truth that this network of memory and knowledge is as needful as nutrition and fresh air! Librarians are very eager to change, but the government – which in this case means the local government – must change first.

Such – at least – is the way the library world often talks about change. The italicized sentences above come from a pamphlet of the Norwegian Library Association (Norsk Bibliotekforening, 1993). That Norwegian public libraries often face tight budgets is undeniable. That reference services could be improved by more money, is also true.

But money in itself is no solution. The organizational structure and the cultural traditions of many public libraries work against the provision of meaningful reference services. As an illustration we may take a few words from the Scottish study, which would also apply to Norwegian reference work: the librarians, on the whole, treated their enquirers with courtesy; what they lacked was a sense that the enquirers themselves had anything to contribute to the reference process (Head, 1993, p. 7).

Identity

The problems brought up by participants, and the discussions we have conducted in training groups, point to a cluster of issues that ultimately have to do with the definition and purpose of librarianship in the public sector. What are librarians for? And what are they not for? Where are the boundaries that separate the professional from the personal, the technical from the private? What does not belong to the task of public librarian?

These are issues on which Norwegian reference librarians – as I know them – disagree. Professional reference services can only be achieved in a setting that values professionalism. To be professional means to be committed to a certain level or quality of service. This quality level can – and ought to – be made explicit. The customer has a right to know what you offer.

Perfect equality of service is hardly possible. We are mutable persons in changeable settings. But the minimum level should not depend on the mood of the day or the attractiveness of the enquirer. On the other hand, professionalism is not the same as Service Unlimited. Those who take care of everything, take good care of nothing. The librarian should know the limits of normal service. Unconditional care belongs to the world of parents, saints and lovers.

In his organizational theory, Mintzberg distinguishes between traditional (or machine) bureaucracies, where rules are external, formal and enforced from above, and professional bureaucracies, where rules are internal, ethical and enforced by one`s peers. I assume that librarians want to become professionals in the latter sense.

But when colleagues disagree on the proper conduct of librarians, and there is little effort to work through the disagreement, it is impossible to build professional communities. Single individuals may be brilliant, dedicated and deeply respected for the quality of their work. But the collective, communal and cumulative nature of professions is absent. Professionals must seek an explicit and shared understanding of their task, and work together to improve levels of service, in order to build professional communities in the modern sense.

Craft or discipline

Librarians know what librarians do. Their collective memory is vast. But our knowledge of what actually goes on in libraries is also intuitive, anecdotal and fragmented. As a social scientist, who only entered the library field full-time some five years ago, I have been surprised by the cumulative mass of information about libraries – a veritable mountain of paper – next to a molehill of hard-nosed analytical knowledge. I can not imagine any commercial provider of information services dealing with its operations in such a relaxed way.

I sense the Norwegian library community hovering between its tradition as a craft and its future as a professional or academic discipline. Our knowledge of library activities is mostly the craft-person`s intimate knowledge of her craft. And the greater value of the badger report was that it exemplified another type of library knowledge: systematic, analytical, and probing.

In the crafts, knowledge is practical and often tacit. It develops by personal experience at work. It cumulates by story-telling. You learn from your elders and you learn by doing. Like other specialized crafts, librarianship has a tendency to become self-sufficient and self-censoring – a vocation with a single authoritative voice. During my years as a teacher of library subjects at Oslo College, a recurrent demand – from the more independent students – has been: Take less for granted. Ask more questions.

In his scathing – and very funny – attack on the structural and cultural inhibitors of disciplinary development in North America, Blaise Cronin says that a “discipline” that trades in feelings rather than ideas, and defines its core as a special kind of service relationship rather than a body of abstract knowledge, is not a discipline: it is, in correctly speaking, a vocation, defined largely in terms of skills and competencies (techne), and as such has no place in the heart of the academy (p.52).

In the academic professions, knowledge is explicit, codified and open to challenge. Science institutionalizes doubt. Knowledge cumulates by continuous testing. Truth is always on trial. The normal response to challenge – for groups as well as individuals – is denial. Doubt is uncomfortable. It takes a disciplined mind and a dedicated community to accept the never-ending scrutiny that lies at the heart of the empirical sciences – in their natural, social and cultural flavors.

In the scientific sense, we know very little about the content of reference work in public libraries. Quality studies have concentrated on ready reference, which is the most easily measured component. But a study of general reference work at two Swedish public libraries in 1995 provides some interesting findings. One of the libraries was a county library system, with one central library and eight local branches, and a total staff of forty (calculated as full-time equivalents). The other was a branch library in Gothenburg (Widebäck, 1996).

The occupational profile that appeared was that of a general purpose librarian-on-duty rather than that of an information retrieval specialist. Practical and logistical tasks, like providing books from the closed stacks – in the central library – and ordering books from other libraries, constituted major components of the work. About half the reference questions were simple questions of orientation within the library - Where do I find books about Y? where do I find the specific book X? The other half consisted mainly of simple factual questions that could be answered by looking at one or two sources – and a smaller group that required more extended searches.

The documented picture of actual reference work deviates strongly from the picture presented and promoted in official documents and debate (p. 17). In the Swedish study, less than ten percent of the tasks called for true professional skills. The Director of Public Libraries may in fact be right: difficult questions that demand professional training may be so infrequent that the skills themselves grow rusty. Scattered evidence seems to indicate that this pattern is typical of small and medium-sized public libraries. The central public libraries in the larger cities do, however, support more professionalized search services. From an economic point of view there seems to be a mismatch between supply and demand. Our reference librarians are either underutilized or overeducated. And we could, in principle, envisage three ways of rectifying the situation:

• encourage the public to ask more challenging questions
• use library assistants to staff the desk, with librarians as a second line service
• make the education of public librarians congruent with the practical work that goes on in libraries

The coming of the WebBut all questions of reference must now be reevaluated. In a networked digital environment the old relationship between professional description and craft based reference can not be sustained. This does not mean that document desription is on the wane. The explosive growth of net-based publishing is creating a new demand for resource mapping, evaluation and description. For all their value, automatic retrieval systems do not discriminate enough. Spiders, web-crawlers and other creatures of the night can not fully replace the professional judgment of the subject specialist. The systems lack – at least for the present – intellectual scalability. So digital descriptions – in all their metadata glory – are in.

But does not the web signal a new era for reference work as well? A golden era for public libraries? Information at the touch of a button? The problem is simple: access to information is increasing thousand-fold – and so is competition.

Internet is already a substantial provider of information in many areas: ready reference, current events, higher education, professional events and organizations, media, museums and exhibitions, travel, government information (local, national, EU), general business information (usually of a positive and uplifting nature), and – not least – special interest groups in any thinkable domain. Most of this information is recent, but there is also a growing body of classical texts and other “copyright-expired” materials available.

The rate of growth is remarkable. It is both quantitative – adding more resources to the areas mentioned, and qualitative – adding new types, kinds and modes of information. We can already envisage a not so distant future when “everything” will be printed on digital paper – unless there is a particular reason for not doing so. Net access will be the normal situation.

Add professional resource description and powerful search engines, and the efficiency of reference work will multiply. But the question now becomes: who will provide the services? Can public libraries – even if free – compete with the new commercial information providers that are entering the reference field?

Competitors

One well-known Web entrepreneur, Bill Gross, is currently exploring the market potential for a commercial, Web-based reference service. His company describes itself as follows:

answers.com is a unique information service that delivers responsive, direct answers to questions regarding personal interest, work, or formal study. When your time is too valuable for unfocused search results, use answers.com to find that specific answer to your question. In most cases, our Answers Advisor will be able to provide a citation from a text reference or from an Internet cite. … answer.com`s modest fee structure, with up charges for faster than 24 hour service, is designed to free you from time-consuming searching, information overload, and dealing with problematic reference sources. You select the degree of difficulty and the time frame for the delivery of the answer. … Custom research projects will be undertaken on a quotation basis.

In contrast to commercial information brokers, which serve the business market, answers.com is clearly aimed at the general public. Its modest fee structure looks as follows:

• Easy – standard factual questions: USD 1,79
• Medium - medium research or informed opinion: USD 5,99
• Hard - extended research or compound answer: USD 11,99
• Custom – by agreement: Ask for quotation

The service is very focused on the customer`s interest in rapid, responsive and direct answers – when your time is too valuable. The professional staff are named Answer Advisors rather than librarians, documentalists or information specialists. Two company slogans sum up the attitude. Customers are told: Great questions … Thoughtful answers. Employees are encouraged to Work fast but reason well.

The logic of networked resources

Public libraries have traditionally served the public at large, primarily in their roles as private individuals or as members of the local community. Increasingly, public libraries are also being asked to support educational activities and programs. Cooperation with primary and secondary schools is growing – though schools also have their own libraries. But the major change in demand is coming from the many thousand students who now pursue further education at home, without physically moving to their teaching institution.

Educational reform

This, however, is only a beginning. The new Norwegian prime minister, Mr. Torbjørn Jagland, has made life-long education one of the central policies of the Labour government. The central organization of Norwegian employers fully agree. Continuous upgrading of skills and knowledge is seen as the key to individual and collective success. A newspaper article from the main Labour newspaper, Arbeiderbladet (January 30, 1997) illustrates his thinking:

Visiting the part-time students Gry Lisbeth Bjørnerud and Wiggo Slåttsveen at their home in Lillehammer, prime minister Torbjørn Jagland was able to test – in advance – the reform he is working on. As full-time employees with 3 children, Gry Lisbeth Bjørnerud and Wiggo Slåttsveen have no chance to follow regular classes.

- We felt the need to upgrade, and this form of education makes it possible, Slåttsveen says. Through video, data, distance education and a few group gatherings both parents have completed their one-year study of pedagogics, and are ready for their exams in a fortnight.

- We must invest in distance education to satisfy the needs of firms and individuals, (Jagland said). That way many more can participate in the adult education reform. In cooperation with libraries, many more will be able to access knowledge directly from the Web, independent of time and geography. Linking colleges and libraries opens unimaginable possibilities.

Plans are underway to allow all employees to use one tenth of their total working life for further education. This means, roughly, to double the current capacity of Norwegian higher education. Public libraries could play a central role in this reform – if they are able to redirect their energies towards systematic educational support. This would also vitalize reference work, by forcing libraries to cope with a steady stream of mature and focused adults – who would not take 55% for an answer. In Norway, I see this as the main hope for reference services and reference staff in public libraries.

Commercial services

Public libraries also have a possible third sphere of action. Librarians have the basic skills, and libraries have many of the information resources and networks, that are needed to support local business. Some Danish libraries, including the central public library in Copenhagen, do this on a small scale. Fees are subsidized and modest.

A few public libraries in Norway have also experimented with market-oriented reference services. But Norwegian law on public libraries, which states that services shall be free of charge to the end user, as well as a strong resolution from the Norwegian Library Association last year (1996), has effectively stopped libraries from engaging in such activities. They could, of course, provide such services free of charge, but that would be hard to justify, given the needs of other customers.

It may, however, be possible to organize non-profit foundations associated with public libraries – and use them as buffers between the non-fee resources and the paying customers. Hope springs eternal. But academic and special libraries are not bound by the non-fee principle. Information access is becoming more and more crucial to local firms. In the future we may therefore see regional college libraries offering market- and technology-oriented reference services – in the documentalist tradition – to local business. Since regional colleges and public libraries also must cooperate much more closely than before, we may see some interesting turns and paso dobles – between local firms, local college libraries, local public libraries and their associated non-profit foundations.

General reference

Till now, public libraries have taken pride in their ability – in principle – to answer any meaningful question presented at the reference desk. The sober reality of reference work – its fragmented, diffuse and undeveloped nature – did not modify the ideal. In a post-modernist world librarians continue to dream of universal systems: universal availability of publications (UAP), universal bibliographic control (UBC), and – we could add – universal access to information (UAI).

The coming of the web means that ordinary individuals will have rapid access to a greater range of reference resources than any librarian could dream of a decade ago. In the age of print, retrieval and reference tools developed gradually, as a slow response to the increasing output of published texts. In the digital age, new forms and institutions supporting retrieval and reference – search engines, quality controllers, subject organizers, FAQs, digital encyclopedias, personalized newspapers, agents and knowbots – are growing as fast as the Web itself. The disorder of the Web is already a myth – the digital continent is being surveyed and organized before your eyes.

If we look ten years ahead, it is hard to envisage general reference work, for the average curious adult, as an important professional task. In a complex, global, multicultural environment, people will have many questions (Childers, 1994). And there will be numerous institutions and organizations, commercial and non-commercial, in every subject domain, to provide guidance, answers and problem-solving. We can assume that nearly all of them will be on the Web – so individuals will be able to access them from their terminal at work or – in many cases – at home. The Web itself is already packed with a legion of intensely competitive information providers – and what they offer is, precisely, what we used to call reference service.

Many librarians argue that people without PCs at home should be able to access the Web through public libraries – and I agree. They also argue that people will need navigation help on the digital Pacific – and I agree. But libraries that move in this direction – which I heartily support – should be aware that the Web is a much more dynamic environment than the world of print. The Web functions globally. If there is a demand for information, it can aggregate thousand scattered customers into one interesting market. Reference librarians do possess skills that are extremely valuable in the Web environment. But the period of local monopoly is passing. As the Web matures, all the various functions of today`s public library will be probed and questioned. The market for free information of mediocre quality will not totally disappear, but it will become profoundly uninteresting.

In the educational reference market we have a chance, since this is a government priority and will be supported by substantial funding – if libraries manage to deliver consistent professional services. In the quality market of general reference we can only compete by imitating our new competitors – and asking the government to pay the bill. I can only say: good luck to those who try.

Librarians dreamt the impossible dream – Universal Access to Information. It is being fulfilled. But should we laugh or cry?

Bibliography

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