Providing Reference Service in Our Sleep: Using a FAQ Database to Guide Users to the Right Sources

Statistics Module: Tracking Usage

In addition to seeing questions added or adapted by other institutions, the FAQ includes a statistics module that collects, for each institution, the queries for which no response was available (figure 5) and also reports the number of hits each question generates. With this information, librarians can make the decision to add additional keywords to a particular question or to modify questions and answers completely for those entries that should have generated a response. This feature of the Business FAQ allows Penn librarians not only to get a sense of the questions not being answered, but affords an opportunity to make things right by adjusting answers or adding relevant index terms to the records.

The Bare FAQs

The Penn version of the FAQ database contains more than five hundred unique, specific questions. Penn’s Business FAQ gets an average of one thousand direct queries per month and more than four thousand hits. Lippincott staff spend an average of three hours a week maintaining the database. For more information on the FAQ, see “Just the FAQs Ma’am” by Michael Halperin, et al. in Journal of Business and Finance Librarianship. ¹

Tour 3: What Patrons See on the Purdue FAQ

Because Purdue’s Management and Economics Library joined with Penn in the Business FAQ, they decided to pattern their other FAQs after it while also continuing to develop each FAQ’s individual interface. The Purdue HSSE FAQ is accessed via a search box on the Humanities, Social Science, and Education Library homepage (www.lib.purdue.edu/hsse) and can be easily browsed by subject (figure 6) or searched by keyword or phrase (figure 7). The system displays the results of subject expansions or keyword queries by listing the questions. Then each question can be opened to display the answer. Within the answers, the FAQ database names are linked directly to the Web sites and databases that answer users’ questions. Each answer is indexed so it is retrievable by many different keywords or phrases.

Conclusion

To reach patrons, librarians need to expand beyond the physical reference desk, and even beyond virtual chat services with a librarian to offer a service that is attractive to users who have grown to expect Google’s immediacy and accessibility. The FAQ model’s aim is to meet patrons where they are, giving them a customized, interactive, always-on database of questions and answers that can be searched or browsed for useful, succinct answers to their most pressing questions.

One of the best aspects of Penn’s Business FAQ is that it is a shared service run by an open cooperative of business librarians. All partners in the project understand that they and their patrons are getting first-rate service drawn from the creative minds of some of the world’s leading business information specialists. Collaboration among libraries creates a shared bank of knowledge, and technology enables it to be monitored and updated according to librarians’ schedules.

Libraries that want to create a similar service in subjects other than business may want to look at the Purdue example, design their own knowledge databank, or work together to create collaborative FAQs in other specializations.

Correspondence concerning this column should be addressed to Judith M. Nixon, Head, Humanities, Social Science and Education Library, 504 West State Street STEW, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, e-mail: jnixon@purdue.edu. Karen Anello is a Business Research Librarian at the University of Pennsylvania’s Lippincott Library of the Wharton School. Brett Bonfield is a Reference Intern at Lippincott and MSLIS student at Drexel University.

Reference

1. Michael Halperin et al., “Just the FAQs, Ma’am: Sharing a Business Knowledge Database,” Journal of Business and Finance Librarianship 12, no. 1 (2006): 33-40.

Appendix. A Short History of FAQs

The FAQ, as a paradigm, originated in Usenet newsgroups. 1 Usenet, one of the precursors to the Web, is a distributed Internet-based discussion system. Many end-user features, communication styles, and information architectures popularized in Usenet newsgroups remain in use today. Emoticons, such as using the colon and right parentheses to indicate a smiley face, are one example, : ); the FAQ is another.

According to the FAQ about FAQs (from the Internet FAQ Archives):

FAQ is an acronym for Frequently Asked Questions. It is also sometimes used as the singular Frequently Asked Question. (Although when was the last time you heard only one question?)

Some have called it Frequently Answered Questions as well. This isn’t necessarily correct, but it isn’t necessarily wrong either. It effectively has the same meaning.

A compilation of Frequently Asked Questions (and their answers) is referred to as a FAQ list or FAQ article. Sometimes the term FAQ itself is used to refer to the article–as an example, I refer to this article as a FAQ about FAQs.

Eugene Miya is generally credited with starting the first FAQ. While working for NASA in 1982, he grew tired of seeing bad answers–”poorly thought out, inconsistent, and uninformed”–being posted in response to recurring questions. He also felt that people posting these questions had too often taken the easy way out, choosing to pose questions they could have found answers to through other media or by searching for earlier question and answer pairs.

The FAQ effectively creates a social structure that benefits both people who have questions and people who wish to see questions answered. Those who wish to see questions answered, by working together to compose a single, clear, authoritative answer, no longer have to answer the same question repeatedly; those with questions are likely to get a better answer from a FAQ than from asking a question many others have asked before them.

Reference

1. “Usenet,” s.v. Wikipedia (accessed Oct. 3, 2006).

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