Current Reference Services at the National Diet Library, Japan, and the Planning of New Services

In the winter of 2013, I visited a number of libraries in Europe and the U.S. to interview librarians about their current reference services. As a member of the Reference Planning Section at the National Diet Library (NDL), I have been involved in the planning of reference services to meet the needs...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inRefer (Birmingham ) Vol. 31; no. 3; p. 14
Main Author Watanabe, Yuriko
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Information Services Group, Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals 01.10.2015
Subjects
National libraries
Online reference work
Reference services
United States > US
Europe
Japan
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Summary:In the winter of 2013, I visited a number of libraries in Europe and the U.S. to interview librarians about their current reference services. As a member of the Reference Planning Section at the National Diet Library (NDL), I have been involved in the planning of reference services to meet the needs of patrons who access the NDL via the Internet, and I was particularly interested in how these libraries overseas provide digital reference services to remote patrons. Through these interviews, I identified several differences between the NDL's current services and those of libraries overseas, which led me to think about what the best way forward for the NDL and libraries all over the world would be. In this article, I would like to provide an overview of our reference services and the differences between the NDL's approach and that of other national libraries as well as present an introduction to one of our new services.
ISSN:0144-2384