Satisfaction

Surveys confirm that information consumers are pleased with the results of their online activities.

Several recent studies indicate that information consumers are, by and large, satisfied with the quality of the information they find on the Web. During 2002, Outsell studied over 30,000 U.S. Internet information seekers. Over 78 percent of survey respondents said the open Web is providing “most of what they need.”16 Well over half of those surveyed responded “Nothing is missing.” In 2002, the UCLA Internet Report found that 52.8 percent of users surveyed believed that most or all of the information is reliable and accurate and 39.9 percent thought about half of the information was reliable and accurate.17

The growing demand for information online has spawned the explosion of Internet-accessible “ask-a services.” Worldwide, 193,000 Internet sites use the phrase “Ask a Librarian.” What isn’t known is how many users of such services have access to similar library services, and why nonlibrary-based reference services might be chosen over a library’s service. What is clear is that information seekers are willing to pay for the convenience of online information services.

Information professionals are, generally, skeptical about the quality of answers provided through “ask-a services,” the sources that are used to answer questions and the resources suggested for further investigations. However, a recent study conducted by Cornell librarians to compare and contrast the Cornell digital reference services with Google Answers yielded some very interesting results and raises some provocative questions about the use of highly trained, relatively expensive information professionals to answer simple reference questions.18

Librarians also wonder why individuals would pay for answers to questions when answers were available for free at their local libraries. Consumers are willing to pay for convenience.19 But for the many people who do not yet have access to virtual reference services, the information hunt would mean a physical visit to the library. And while the answers may not come with a bill, there are costs associated with this.

In preparation for this chart, we submitted our question to Google Answers. “What is the average cost of a visit to the doctor?” We received an answer in 41 minutes. Although we did not consider the source provided to be the most authoritative, the Google Answer matched our cited source.

There are features and services built into most Web sites that allow the information consumer to share. Instead of asking the librarian to use ILL to move an item from one library to another, the Web-savvy consumer can poke the ubiquitous “e-mail this article” button and off the content goes to you and several friends. In a work environment, it’s a lot faster to send articles of interest this way to colleagues than it is to print an e-journal article and distribute it. And it may be that the e-mailed article might not be a scholarly article but expediency overrules effort. Call this IUE: Inter User Exchange.

Librarians worry that information found using search engines does not have the credibility and authority of information found in libraries, and that people will not learn basic information seeking skills. They worry that due to inadequate search terms and skills, much valuable material may be undiscovered.

There are some points to be made about these worries. First, most library users do not make a stop at the reference desk as they embark on their information safari with a well-trained guide. They boldly set off to look for answers on their own. This may take the form of wandering around the stacks, browsing and waiting for serendipity to strike. Or they make use of the filtering services the library provides: the online catalog and indexes. It is very likely that the terms being used in the catalog and the indexes are not the “best” ones—the ones a librarian would suggest—but unless each information seeker has a guardian librarian perched on a shoulder, the “good enough” terms will usually suffice. And the library user will never know what was missed.

Library collections contain material representing the gamut of opinions on topics. Any large academic or public library might own material on parapsychology, on Holocaust denial, on euthanasia, on the chemical processes for making LSD. There is nothing inherent in the organization and structure of the library that marks this content as “possibly illegal, fraudulent or outright crazy—use at your own risk.” And librarians will vociferously defend the individual’s right of access to such materials. But what this means, of course, is that many users of libraries also find material of dubious authority, quality, accuracy and reliability.

The indisputable fact is that information and content on the open Web is far easier and convenient to access and find than is information and content in libraries, virtual or physical. The downside is that there is no controlled vocabulary and no classification system to bring the intellectual order of a library to the Web. The upside is that there is no controlled vocabulary and no classification system. The information consumer types a term into a box, clicks a button and sees results immediately. For the most part the information consumer is satisfied. As any marketer knows, it is very difficult to get satisfied consumers to change brands. There has to be a very clear payoff and advantage.

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