Public Libraries and Questions about the Environment

Investigates whether public libraries are capable of providing a basic science enquiry service. Examines the range of environmental enquiries handled by five participating libraries as a part of their everyday business. During the study some 110 detailed enquiries where recorded: somewhat less than 20 per cent of these concerned local environmental questions; the rest related to environmental queries at the national or global level. The three most popular topics were:pollution; names/addresses of environmental organizations and people;and recycling. Enquirers were evenly split between school attenders and adults. Most of the enquiries could be answered by making use of the resources already available in the library; no more than 10 per cent had to be referred elsewhere for an answer.