Phone the library, but don't expect it to refer to a book

A poll of HE libraries that repeated a survey of 21 years ago finds three of five offering correct answers. Chloe Stothart and Sarah Cunnane report

The march of Wikipedia and Google into university libraries has been highlighted by a Times Higher Education survey.

The magazine repeated a survey first carried out 21 years ago by the head of learning resources at what was then North London Polytechnic. In both cases 20 university libraries were telephoned at random by a caller posing as a student, and were asked for the answers to several questions - 15 each in the old survey and four in the new one.

No library answered all four questions correctly in the latest poll. Correct answers were given to 58 per cent of questions in the 2008 survey compared with 61 per cent of answers to four equivalent questions in 1987.

Only two of 20 libraries were able to provide the correct boiling point of ethanol, making it the most incorrectly answered question in the 2008 survey, whereas only two libraries provided the wrong answer in the original poll.

Wikipedia proved the undoing of most libraries on this question because the libraries quoted the figure given in its entry, which was incorrect at the time of the survey. However, a sample of ten reference books in the original study had supplied four different answers to this question.

In the new survey, the questions "Cyril Hinshelwood won the Nobel prize in which category?" and "'All the world's a stage/And all the men and women merely players' is a quotation from which Shakespeare play?" produced the most correct answers, with 16 respondents in the 2008 survey answering correctly.

Library staff consulted the web to supply answers in the majority of cases.

In the middle of the pack was the question "Who is the current Cabinet Minister for Transport?", which yielded 12 correct answers. Some of the incorrect responses were supplied because one of the first names to come up on a Google search was the Junior Transport Minister, not the Secretary of State. In 1987 the same question about the Transport Minister of the day elicited the lowest number of correct replies.

In the new survey, only four of 80 responses were made with the aid of a book.

The University of Warwick's library earned plaudits for knowing the answer to the Nobel laureate question without looking it up. Warwick is home to a specialist electronic collection on winners of the prize in chemistry.

Shakespeare fans at the universities of St Andrews, Birmingham and East Anglia knew the origin of the quotation off the top of their heads. But a few specialist librarians provided the wrong answers to the questions about their subjects.

Unlike its older counterpart, the 2008 survey also tested customer service and found exemplary helpfulness alongside rudeness. Several institutions called their subject specialist librarians to the phone or rang back. But one university's librarian seemed bemused as to why anyone would telephone a library with a question, several refused to answer or said they did not provide help by phone, while another became irate. One said: "I'm not being funny, but if you want to know so badly you should find out yourself."

Jane Core, director of library and learning services at Northumbria University, said that some libraries used non-librarians to answer the telephones, but added that libraries needed clear policies on how to handle inquiries - for example, passing callers from the person answering the phone to an inquiries desk and then perhaps a specialist librarian.

Commenting on the high use of Wikipedia and Google as the sole source of answers, she said that libraries should help students to use a range of sources and to judge the information they find critically. "With the internet, in particular, people have more choice than ever so they need more skills than ever to evaluate what they find. We get fewer phone calls than before, but it is still a legitimate way of coming into inquiry services and should be treated quite seriously," she said.

Roy Williams, the librarian who carried out the original research, said: "Twenty years ago, we probably had only 4,000 students at London Met; there are now 28,000. The challenge for libraries is to provide an individual tailored service in a mass education system, which is very difficult but can be done."

He thought that libraries were now more geared to answering questions by e-mail than by telephone, although he added that phone inquiries were not a big feature of libraries at the time of his research.

He chose his questions because the answers were factual and straightforward but needed to be looked up from standard reference sources. His study was inspired by similar tests of US libraries.

Chris Powis, deputy director of academic services at the University of Northampton, said: "I am quite surprised that they just looked on Wikipedia. I would expect people to understand what it is and why it might be a good idea to double-check anything from there. But I suspect nothing has changed with libraries' approach to questions. I think there would always have been some librarians going for quick answers."

He added that he was astonished that some libraries did not think it was their role to answer questions by phone. "I think responsiveness to students has got better, so I am surprised at that," he said.

chloe.stothart@tsleducation.com.