Moly.hu as a virtual meeting place

Abstract

The findings of a questionnaire survey among the users ofMoly.hu (Hungary) and Bokelskere.no (Norway) are presented which may be interesting forHungarian readers. The survey was aimed at finding out how far these interfaces – wherepeople with a variety of interests and backgrounds may meet – are functioning as virtualcommunity spaces. The investigations covered the composition, habits, reading taste andreading motivation of users. The findings indicate that most of the users are young womenwith a high educational attainment, ethnically belonging to the majority of society.Information acquisition is dominating among the purposes of use, while experiencing a senseof community comes to the background. As regards taste, respondents can be described asambitious or demanding, and they show significant differences in terms of both the genrespreferred and reading motivation. It was found that readers with differing tastes have anopportunity to start a dialogue, to express their opinions and to form each other’s views,which is, however, not the case with various social strata. For libraries one of the main lessonsof this research is that a vivid and active community can be created for their target audience invirtual space which can attract the lovers of books and reading.