What is it about?

This article explains why human mediated reference service is still important in academic libraries in digital environment. It also justifies the importance of human-to-human interaction for providing efficient and effective reference service in digital age.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

Although reference service is the “most visible service” in academic libraries, it has been under scrutiny for years. As more and more academic library users are embracing digital technology and digital resources in quest of information on their own, the need of human mediated reference services in libraries is being questioned by many. A lot of library professionals predicting a dire future for reference services.This article aims to justify the importance and the value of human mediated reference service in academic libraries . Also, we explain in this article why digital technology fails to outperform reference librarians' expertise, intelligence, analytical and critical thinking skills.

Perspectives

This article is unique as it presents the history, evolution and current trends in reference service in academic libraries. we critically analyze the merits and demerits of these trends to establish the need for mediated reference service in academic libraries. The arguments used in this article will be useful for library and informational professionals as validation for the need to hire skilled, knowledgeable reference librarians to provide reference services in a digital environment. The authors found no articles that presented a comprehensive overview of reference services in academic libraries the way this article did.

Aditi Bandyopadhyay
Adelphi University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Is the need for mediated reference service in academic libraries fading away in the digital environment?, Reference Services Review, November 2016, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/rsr-02-2016-0012.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page