Tuesday, May 22, 2001

Libraries Offer Online Reference Services to One Another By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK For the past half-year, the Library of Congress and 100 or so other libraries around the world have been helping one another provide round-the-clock answers to reference questions like "What's the Yiddish word for midget?" and "How do Ukrainian emigrants in Saskatchewan celebrate Christmas?" Now, the libraries are gearing up to expand their membership and hope to extend the service soon to anyone with access to the Internet. Organizers say they hope to recruit as many as 200 additional academic, national, public, and private libraries by the end of the year to join the project, which is now known as the Collaborative Digital Reference Service. They plan to change its name to something a bit less bureaucratic by early 2002, when backers expect to begin offering its service directly to the public. A brainchild of the Library of Congress, the service was conceived by librarians as an intellectually richer alternative to a quick-hit Web search, according to Diane Nester Kresh, director of public-service collections there. "We want to be offering an alternative to Ask Jeeves," she says. It's not that Web-search tools are bad, she adds. But a search of the Internet will turn up only the information that happens to be online, while a library may have a source that is "more accurate and relevant" in its stacks or in other offline repositories. Besides, she adds, "some of the Web sites are weird." So far, the service has operated as a library-to-library operation, with reference experts submitting patrons' questions online. Software that powers the system then routes the question to the library best suited to answer it -- based on information the library has provided about its expertise and about its hours of operation. The software also ensures that no library is asked to respond to more than 10 questions a week. Ms. Kresh estimates that libraries have answered as many as 4,000 questions since the service began, usually within two days. Cornell University, one of the first to join the service, says Cornell librarians are answering more questions from other libraries than they are sending out from their own patrons, but they have directed some questions to the service as well. To help a time-pressed graduate student find a list of prisons in Scotland in 1750, for example, librarians at Cornell relied on the service for the answer. They also used it to help a faculty member with a question about a scholarly journal, says Paul J. Constantine, head of reference services for humanities and social-sciences libraries. Academic libraries make up about one-third of the current membership. Other participating libraries include the national libraries of Australia, Britain, and Canada, and at least 10 other libraries abroad. Participants do not pay to take part. The Library of Congress developed the software that runs the service. The service plans to make a big push for new participants at the American Library Association's meeting next month. O.C.L.C., a library-service organization, is managing some of that marketing, as well as developing an accessible archive of all the questions and answers that have already been processed. "Ideally a question would pass through that first," Ms. Kresh says, relieving libraries from having to answer the same question again. Although organizers had hoped to begin offering the service directly to the public by this June, Ms. Kresh says that they found they needed to tweak some aspects of the service -- including the query form that patrons would use to ask questions -- because it is now geared toward experienced reference professionals. Eventually, she says, the service hopes to be able to answer patrons' questions within two hours. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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