摘要：While in classical dictionaries the emphasis was on data (in an academic dictionary, the user often struggles with the problem of information overload), an electronic dictionary focuses on the user’s perspective. For the lexicographer this means not merely the need to search for a suitable ergonomic arrangement of dictionary data. Within such approach the very theoretical bases of lexicography are being redefined in the sense that the dictionary is primarily a utilitarian product whose function is to satisfy certain information and communicative needs of the users. At the federated search portal of the Ľ. Štúr Institute of Linguistics, there are available several digitized versions of printed lexicographical works that have been published by this academic institution. The first and the second part of this paper deals with dictionaries in the context of language cultivation and its alternatives. As the prescriptive codification (i.e. dividing linguistic means into standard and non-standard ones) constitutes part of the culture of the users of the Slovak language, the page-views of online dictionaries are very high. However, none of the above referred to Slovak dictionaries available online (neither the descriptive nor the prescriptive ones) sufficiently reflect the most frequent requirements of the users, and the second part of the paper will try to explain why this is the case. The everyday linguistic problems of the users are being dealt with by the “non-dictionary reference genre”, namely by the telephone and internet Advisory Services of the Institute of Linguistics. The most frequent types of information required by the users (e.g. questions concerning capitalization, hyphenation, spelling and semantics of neologisms, and declension and conjugation) are discussed in the third part of the paper. Another aim of the third part is to indicate in what way the data collected via the questions addressed to the Advisory Services and the answers provided, together with the three different types of expertise (theoretical morphology, corpus linguistics, and monolingual lexicography), determine the design of the Slovak digital-born Orthographic and Grammatical Dictionary that is at present being created.
关键词：user needs; language advisory services; orthographic and grammatical dictionary; prescriptive codification
