Since its inception in 1999, the service has received a total of 103,744 questions, of which 80,432 have been asked by e-mail and 23,312 by chat.

Recently, the Subdirectorate General for Library Coordination released the 2022 annual statistics of the Pregunte: las bibliotecas responden service.

Since its inception in 1999, the service has received a total of 103,744 questions, of which 80,432 have been asked by e-mail and 23,312 by chat.

In 2022, a total of 3,897 questions were received, of which 1,831 were channeled via e-mail and 2,066 questions via chat, with an average of 5 questions per day in the e-mail mode and 6 questions per day in the chat mode.

For the fifth consecutive year, the number of questions received by chat exceeded those sent by e-mail, which is explained by the immediacy of the response offered by the chat mode.

In the e-mail mode, the most consulted subject was Library Science and Documentation with 682 questions, which means that the Ask service is not achieving the purpose for which it was created and that it is maintained thanks to the queries from candidates and students and, to a lesser extent, from professionals.

In the chat mode, most of the questions were about Libraries (965 questions), which shows that most of the users did not understand the national cooperative structure of the service nor its purpose, since they used the chat with the intention of contacting their usual library.

With regard to the satisfaction surveys, despite the low number of questions sent by users (13% of the questions), the majority are satisfied or very satisfied with the response obtained, 90% for the e-mail mode and 84% for the chat mode.

The fact that satisfaction with the response obtained is higher in the e-mail modality may be due to the fact that this modality offers a more elaborated response and provides a greater number of sources.

More than 95% of the users who completed the satisfaction surveys for both modalities would use the service again and would recommend it to an acquaintance.

With respect to the visits registered on the service’s website, the majority came from Spain (62%) compared to 38% of visits made from abroad, mostly from Spanish-speaking countries.

The cell phone was the device most used to access the service’s website (50%), surpassing for the first time the computer (48%). The remaining 2% corresponds to visits registered on tablets. The most popular means of access was through web search engines (75% of visits).

Thanks to the advertising campaign promoted by Google Ads and the Facebook and Instagram profiles of the General Directorate of Books and Promotion of Reading (MCD), 2 million people were reached and with this, a total of 41,730 people accessed the service’s website. However, this campaign did not manage to increase the use of the service in subjects other than «Libraries» or «Library Science and Documentation», nor did it increase the use of the service in official languages other than Spanish, so a greater investment in dissemination is required to bring the service closer to the public.

Text: Consejo de Cooperación Bibliotecaria