Tord HØIVIK

Oslo University College, Norway
tord.hoivik@jbi.hio.no

BOBCATSSS symposium, January 29th -31st, 2007

 

Introduction

 

Libraries provide three types of services: lending, in-house and web-based services. Most people still associate libraries with books and loans (OCLC. Perceptions of libraries and information resources, 2005), but non-book, in-house and web-based activities are becoming steadily more important. Providing answers - rather than books - is also a traditional library function. Several European countries - like the Netherlands, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway - provide digital reference services at the national level. In Norway, a network of public libraries runs a joint service called Biblioteksvar ("Ask the Library", ATL). ATL accepts questions by e-mail, chat and SMS and currently processes about two thousand questions a month.

 

All free Q&A-services face a dilemma. If they offer high quality to a large public, they may - as they get widely known - be swamped by a flood of questions. In that case, active marketing would be a bane rather than a blessing.. The pedagogical project Puggandplay is probably the largest virtual reference service (VRS) in Norway. It is financed by the government and directed at the age group 9-13 years (middle school). Here, students may ask questions covering four major school subjects: mathematics, natural science, Norwegian language and literature and social studies.

 

Puggandplay is staffed by teacher students rather than librarians. As more and more teachers and students discovered the service, the number of queries exploded:

 

    * 13 thousand questions in the school year 01-02

    * 25 thousand in 02-03

    * 45 thousand in 03-04

 

The project no longer promises to answer all questions. And if we look at the potential demand, this is only the beginning. In Norway, there are about three hundred thousand girls and boys in the relevant age group. If they posted, on the average, just one question a month during the school year, we are speaking of three million questions per year or about ten thousand questions per day.

 

In the United States, the Virtual Reference Desk (VRD) functions as an umbrella organization for a numerous web-based reference services. In its guidelines for service providers (version 5, June 2003), VRD explicitly recognizes the overflow problem. Guideline 11 says: - Publicize: 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.

 

Libraries may respond to this dilemma in various ways:

 

    * increasing work capacity (recruit more libraries into the network)

    * reducing the work load (answer selected questions only)

    * lowering the quality (superficial answers, long response times)

    * replacing persons by software (search our database first ....) 

    * reducing public exposure (boring design, minimal marketing)

 

At the moment our ATL network receives less than one percent of all reference inquiries that are directed to the public library sector. The potential for growth is vast. The question of marketing thus becomes acute. As a front-line library service, ATL is professionally obliged to answer all questions - and can not afford to lower the quality. The service as such is great - but if it is broadly marketed, the traffic may overwhelm the system. Low visibility, on the other hand, may reduce political impact, good-will and support.

 

Two early services

 

The first VRS of which I am aware was established in 1992 - by librarians for other librarians. Anne Feeney, at Rosary College's Graduate School of Library and Information Science, created the e-mail list STUMPERS-L. STUMPERS was "a place for librarians (and others) to discuss reference questions" which they were unable to answer on their own, using available resources.

 

The STUMPERS archives contain thousands of questions with responses from the library community. Today, it might be called a typical Web 2.0-application. The original service, including the archives, was closed by the infrastructure provider (then Dominican University) at the end of 2005. But the project created a strong sense of community among the people most involved, and there are now plans to revive the Q&A-service and to make the old archives accessible again (Project Wombat).

 

Another early VRS was Ask Dr. Math. It is staffed by professional math teachers and provides support to students of mathematics at all age levels. The service was established with funding from the National Science Foundation in 1994 and is still going strong twelve years later. Over the years, a great number of questions have been answered, and the Q&A archive has become a substantial resource in its own right. Since mathematics is a highly structured subject, the same questions tend to recur. Visitors are therefore asked to look at the archive - at the proper age level - before they submit a new question. The home page provides this sequence:

 

   1. Browse the Archive

   2. Search the Archive

   3. Can't find the Answer: Write to Dr. Math

 

When you browse, the initial choices are:

 

   1. FAQ - Formulas - Selected Answers

   2. Elementary School - Middle School - High School - College & Beyond

 

This structure looks well designed. The first few times you use a new system, you should be encouraged to browse rather than search. Searching takes you directly to the goal, if you are lucky - and into the wilderness, if you are not. Browsing the FAQ list and looking at some typical answers, give you a better sense of the virtual environment. But if you just need a specific formula, which would be a known-item search, you might as well get it immediately.

 

Norway 1997: Ask the Library

 

Norway was also a pioneer in the field of digital reference. The original Ask the library-service was established by Oslo Public Library in October 1997. In 1998, one of library managers wrote: “Through ATL we receive a wide range of questions - some of them very difficult. Users with access to specialized libraries, like students in higher education, still send their questions to us instead of using their own institutional libraries.”

 

Initially, ATL only used e-mail. In 2002 one of our county libraries (Vestfold) started an experimental chat-based service, while the public library of Trondheim explored the use of SM. Today, all three channels are combined into a single national service. Both chat and SMS attract - not surprisingly - a younger set of users.

 

ATL is organized as a network. The work is coordinated from Oslo. Oslo Public Library - with a staff of about two hundred - is the biggest public library in Norway. A two person project group - one project director and one computer specialist - manages the social and technical processes of the network. ATL is a complex operation, involving more than forty libraries and their reference staff. For many years, only public libraries were involved in the network. But in the future, says Norwegian library policy, all libraries - specialized and public, should work as one coherent system of resources. 

 

A recent White Paper on library policy (2006) says: “Participation supports professional developement. - The sector may use its resources on one joint service rather than on many local ones. The users may interact with a single, high quality reference service rather than several local ones with variable quality”. (Source: Bibliotekreform 2014, p. 227). The internal boundaries in the library sector are irrelevant to the user in search of documents and information. Today, three special libraries - covering statistics, medicine and geology - and one school library also participate in the network.

 

The reference market

 

Librarians have always helped their users find both the materials and the answers they need. But they have never been in a monopoly position, of course. Looking for information is a normal part of everyday life. We do not contact the library every time we need a map of Oslo, a weather forecast, a short poem about mortality or a splendid recipe for chocolate chip cookies.

 

We get information from family and friends, from colleagues and neighbors, from shop assistants and information desks. We read newspapers and travel guides, search in cookbooks and encyclopedias, and consult our private bookshelves - which may be more or less well-stocked with telephone directories, atlases, dictionaries and other sources of ready reference.

 

We are surrounded by a myriad of information providers, formal and informal, and most of them offer their services for free. Friends do it for fun and mutuality - next time it is my turn! Voluntary organizations do it to spread their message. Good answers on global warming are good for recruitment to environmental groups. Business does it for goodwill, network building and future profit.     

 

But in the industrial economy there was no real reference market. The streams of questions and the supply of answers were clearly segmented. Libraries coexisted with all the other providers, and had their own secure position within a stable division of labor. Today this structure is changing. 

 

We lack good empirical surveys on the changes in reference demand in the library sector. But the massive impact of search engines and the Web on private, public and commercial life, in all countries with a large modern sector, is evident. This includes not only the highly industrialized countries of the "global West", but also China, India and a range of developing economies.

 

The median number of reference queries registered by the member libraries of the American Research Libraries Association since 1995 - when these statistics were first published declined from about 160 thousand per year in the mid-nineties to less than one hundred thousand in 2003 (ARL statistics interactive edition homepage). To understand what is happening, we need to look more closely at the two sides of the markets: those who ask questions (the reference consumers) and those who provide answers (the reference suppliers).

 

The consumers

 

Public libraries have traditionally taken a universalistic approach to reference work. Like letters in the postal system, all queries were defined as equally important. Every item should be processed in the same professional way. Sometimes crossword puzzles and competitions were explicitly excluded. But most librarians dislike evaluating the questions they answer. Who am I to judge my fellow woman?

 

From a practical point of view, however, libraries can neither treat their users as a collection of unique individuals - or as a single undifferentiated mass. Full standardization is too limiting. Fully individual service is too expensive. In Norwegian public libraries, there is typically eight staff members per ten thousand users (or twenty thousand population). We need to address sub-groups rather than the population at large. People search for information for different purposes and from different settings. As a first step towards segmentation I would consider the following categories:

 

   1. Children and youth doing school projects or studying school subjects

   2. Children and youth in everyday life (outside school)

   3. Students and adults involved in formal education

   4. Adults in work situations

   5. Adults in everyday life (outside work and formal education)

 

In marketing terms, these five demographic groups represent five different demand profiles. The first - helping with homework - is basically formed by teachers and curricula rather than by the youngsters that actually pose the questions. Very often, you can hear the "teacher's voice" in the actual phrasing: -  Hi! I need some information about How does water stabilize body temperature? can you help me find a short answer to this question. short and easy please (Question 12760, literal translation)

 

The second stream of questions is generated by a wide variety of hobbies, interests, personal problems - as well as pure, naked curiosity: - Hi! I wonder if laughing till it hurts will make your stomach muscles strong. When you have laughed for a while, it hurts as badly as after a lot of sit-ups (Question 12570).

 

The third is again shaped by educational aims. But student questions tend to be more individual.  People in higher education take more responsibility for the search process and their own learning. They do not parrot the teacher to the same degree as youngsters in a school setting.

 

Mature adults in work situations rarely use ATL. Professionals that cannot answer the standard range of job-related questions on their own are likely to end up without jobs. At work we create routines to handle recurrent ones. The questions that emerge in the work context, without finding an immediate answer, are narrow, special, and one-of-a-kind. They may be complex, containing several parts, and the users require final, authoritative responses. Public libraries are poorly equipped to handle this type of queries. Google answers, which draws on the personal expertise of hundreds of professionals, seems better adapted to the job-related market.

 

Public libraries were originally created to support informal adult learning. In the twentieth century, they have also reached out to children. During the last thirty years, our public library profile has turned more and more towards children and their parents. But adults still represent more than half of the lending volume. On the reference side the SMS and chat channels are, as mentioned, dominated by young people. Impressionistic data suggest that the adult share of e-mail questions is going down.

 

The suppliers

 

A market, in sociological terms, is an arena where social actors meet in order to exchange valued goods, services or symbols. Markets in a narrower sense involve money or one of its equivalents (gold, cattle, cowry shells ...). Here we treat the large-scale, organized exchange of questions and answers as a (sociological) market - whether money is directly involved or not. The old  "reference industry" consists of specialized firms and consultants selling their information-retrieval skills to other firms and professionals. This segment of the reference world - which is a typical business-to-business sector (B2B) - has its own dynamics. Its history goes way back - at least to the age of mainframes and big bibliographic databases.

 

But here I am concerned with the consumer rather than the business market for reference. In this market, a great variety of organizations provide answers - mostly for free - to individuals. Helping individuals in search of information is still a central part of the library mission. But the coming of the web is changing the rules of the game.

 

The web-based, or networked, economy has also been called an attention economy. The big organizations - firms, public bodies and voluntary associations - still want a piece of our money.  But they also want our attention - our interest, our concern, our commitment, our eyes and ears - in their own right. Today, every "guy with a computer" can read, publish and interact - through a web that spans the world. Our scarcest commodity is time. Both commercial and non-commercial actors need our support and goodwill in order to prosper.

 

Fifteen years ago libraries had a well-defined position in the information field. We did our thing and they did their thing. Today, the established division of work between libraries and other information providers is collapsing. The very idea of searching is now more closely associated with Google than with libraries. As information consumers we want access to relevant facts and documents in our own "ambience" - anytime and anywhere. We want “ambient findability” (Peter Morville). Like Google, libraries must be present where we work, study and play. The future of reference is "out there".

 

General and special suppliers

 

Norway's ATL presents itself as a general service. "You may ask any questions about anything", the instructions state. "We will try to give a direct answer or refer you to sources where you will find the answer. We use both printed sources from the library, sources on the web and available databases".

 

In practice, we have noted, most questions are school related or come from everyday life. The more advanced and technical questions that occur in higher education or at work are better handled by specialized libraries and other subject-oriented information providers. Sweden has recognized the special needs of students and has created a separate ATL - called Librarian on duty (Jourhavande bibliotekarie) for universities and colleges. The student service collaborates closely with the general ATL (Fråga biblioteket), however.

 

The public library sector might as well accept this situation and focus on the three groups that remain:

 

• Children and youth in everyday life (outside school)
• Children and youth doing school projects or studying school subjects
• Adults in everyday life (outside work and formal education)

 

The first category is the easiest one. When youngsters ask on their own, the questions may be tricky, but they are seldom difficult in a technical sense: - What is the normal weight for a fifteen year old boy? (Question 11943).  - Hi! Can you eat lynxes <a big carnivore>? (Question 9894). - Which country has the most beautiful women? (Question 12205).

 

For this group, ATL could actually do more to attract new users: develop a separate portal devoted to children (which Sweden and Denmark has done), organize “curiosity questions” for browsing and market the service to kids and their parents. The questions that children ask spontaneously are a cultural resource in their own right: funny, creative and suggestive. But libraries could collaborate much more closely with other groups that are interested in children: scientists, teachers and resourceful parents. Curious children should normally get proper answers rather than information about sources, I believe.

 

Pedagogical reference

 

Norwegian public libraries face challenges in all three markets, however. Most e-mail questions are now related to school work. When librarians deal with these questions, they should not just provide the answers. They are drawn into the learning process, whether they want to or not - and must think as teachers rather than as information providers.

 

At the same time both library and school authorities need to recognize the vast potential demand for homework support. Looking at the number and content of school questions that come to ATL, it is quite clear that the service has been "discovered" by relatively few schools and classes. Discovery is often collective, with nearly identical questions coming in at the same time. Active marketing of today's ATL in the school environment, which has more than half a million students in the relevant age groups, would flood the system with questions.

 

So far, schools, teachers and libraries have approached the field of digital support in a tentative and uncoordinated way. The one exception is the Puggandplay project, which integrates an e-mail based Q&A service with educational television, a set of web based subject resources and a searchable archive of fifteen thousand answers. Like Ask Dr. Math, this project points in the right direction. Pedagogical reference work, which is inherently time consuming, should be developed as a supplement to well-organized resources that students can navigate on their own. The expensive personal service must be protected from uncontrolled demand.

 

Wikipedia is a well-structured information environment, which can be useful to older students. But Wikipedia is basically written for grown-ups, not for children. Young students need controlled sets of resources adapted to their age level - like the Simple English Wikipedia. In Norwegian, of course.

 

The general conclusion is simple. A scalable school-oriented reference service must:

 

   1. Recruit a joint network of librarians and teachers (lots of team-building required)

   2. Develop good web resources, subject by subject, for the main age levels (lots of writing required)

   3. Invest in attractive, stimulating, pedagogical web design (lots of testing required)

   4. Reserve personal answers for special questions

 

When these things have been done, promotion and marketing can start.

 

Reference for adults

 

The questions grown-ups ask – outside the formal settings of work and study – span a vast variety of topics, subjects, problems and situations. In this market there are some major development trends that impact on libraries:

 

1. Users are in general becoming more educated. In the past, the average librarian had more years of education (three years of college) than the average user. This differential is disappearing. In the future librarians will often encounter people with similar or higher qualifications.
2. Users are also becoming more competent in using the web to find information on their own. The questions that remain are the difficult ones.
3. Other social actors – web firms, commercial bodies, voluntary organizations and the government - are setting up their own virtual reference services. Usually these are more specialized and thus better able to provide detailed and authoritative answers. They also tend to integrate Q&A services with rich web sites, where visitors can find information on many popular topics.

 

The providers that compete with libraries actors usually have more functional business models. For public libraries, more questions means more work, but not more money. Public library financing, which comes from more than four hundred municipalities, is decoupled from the actual production process. The specialized “reference producers”, on the other hand, set up their services with specific purposes in mind. They work in well-defined areas with high demand: people want information about health, about travel, about consumer goods, about taxes, about government regulations, and so on.

 

From the library point of view, the result is a gradual erosion of the market. In the attention economy, the juicy parts of reference generate their own services – because other actors are willing to invest in attracting visitors. Our traditional broad slogans - The library has the answer! We answer all questions! – begin to sound hollow. The Norwegian ATL is constantly struggling to keep up with demand. But the pattern of demand is changing. We are losing grown-ups to other services – and need to reinvent the whole concept of reference for adults before we can start promoting the service with the many tools that modern marketing offers.