The information covers a variety of fields that can range from industry to health care. The service of this library is, however, not bound only to users who actually walk through the door. During my visit there, I saw no other person actually in the library but the staff was hard at work. Providing information to users is a larger part of the service of this library than of many others. The reason for this is the fact that it contains a lot of material that is not to be found elsewhere due to its nature.
Queries arrive by a variety of means.
That can be by phone, fax, e-mail, letter or by users actually coming to the library. The staff takes some months and counts the number of queries and by what means they arrive during that month. I saw the results for late 1998 and 1999 and the largest category was queries that arrive by phone, followed by e-mail and the third largest category, but considerably smaller than the other two, was queries from visitors in the library. Another fact that I noticed in these results was that the total number seems to be going up. The subj ect of these queries is usually related to the information that the institute collects and processes and most of this material is on electronic form.