Worldwide Digital Reference Service
Begins Trial Run
A consortium of public, national, and academic libraries has launched the pilot phase of a free online reference service that quickly puts researchers in touch with a library that can best answer their questions. The Collaborative Digital Reference Service, a project hosted by the Library of Congress in collaboration with the national libraries of Canada and Australia and some 60 other institutions, began taking questions November 17 that were submitted through consortium members.
Diane Nester Kresh, LC’s director of public service collections, said she expects to offer the service to the public on a Web site by June 2001. “We’re taking the library skills and collections that we have and treating it as a collection that anyone could have access to,” Kresh told the Associated Press November 19.
The first question, which asked about books published recently on ancient Byzantine cuisine, came from a British library and was fielded by Nancy O’Neill at Santa Monica (Calif.) Public Library. O’Neill said “there are a whole lot more people out there who have an information need that we can answer accurately with authoritative information,” rather than allowing commercial services like AskJeeves or Yahoo! to fill the void.
Posted November 27, 2000.
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