The death of the telephone enquiry

Today's Times Higher Education carries a report of a telephone survey of twenty university libraries' enquiry services. Repeating a survey carried out by the Polytechnic of North London in 1987, journalists rang up and asked four questions. Alarmingly, only two of the twenty could give the correct boiling point of ethanol, 78.32°C, the others using Wikipedia which at the time of the survey gave a wrong figure. But even worse, several libraries, six in the case of the ethanol question, refused to answer the enquiry at all.

Comments

[Chris Keene]

Is it the job of a library to answer questions, or to point people in the right direction, which will help them for future?

Should a library answer a question even if its user-base has no academic reason to need to know the answer (though this is dodgy ground, you never know what people want).

If libraries have limited budgets, should they continue to provide a phone based 'answer anything' service even if it means cutting back in other areas (longer queues, less items)?

Not saying what is right, but not sure I'm fully alarmed as you!

Cheers
Chris