Looking back on my amateur investigations within formal academic disciplines, I'm struck by the degree to which learned professionals in widely divergent fields, Shakespeare and physics, were willing to deal with an unknown member of the general public.

When I considered this cooperativeness in more depth, though, it actually made a good deal of sense.

Don't academicians tend to go into their line of work wanting to contribute to human knowledge?  How out of character would it be, then, for them to give a moment of their time to impart some of that knowledge to an interested person from the world at large?

Probably a good many of them would actually be pleased to reach somebody besides other academics and students.  By communicating with curious members of the general public, they could confirm their sense of value to a larger community.

Moreover, this urge may only be strengthened today by the isolation imposed on academics by the media's growing role as arbiters of socially-accepted knowledge.