VARIETIES OF INFORMATION REQUESTS IN A MEDICAL LIBRARY.

In an analysis of the information requests received and recorded in the Cleveland Medical Library over a two-year period, the requests were classified in four groups according to whether they were direct inquiries (factual), indirect (subject), biographical and directory, or requests for verification of literature citations. An attempt was made to discover some of the major characteristics and the volume of activity in each class. The results reflect the information services supplied by a single library with its own unique clientele and functions, rather than provide a means of generalizing about information services in all libraries, although they may give us some useful insights. Detailed analyses are made of direct and of biographical and directory questions. The largest number of inquiries received were those in which literature references on a specified subject were requested (indirect inquiries); these represented over 50 percent of the total. Most of the requests in this category called for limited coverage (five articles or less) in the recent literature (not over five years). Requests for verification of citations ranked next with 25 percent of the total, followed by direct (factual) inquiries (12 percent) and biographical and directory inquiries (9 percent), although it is recognized that these last two classes are probably underrepresented in the sample.