The inclusion or not of chat services within Virtual Reference (VR) is an important topic for university libraries. Increasingly, email supported by a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) database is suggested in the scholarly literature as the preferred, cost-effective means for providing university VR services. This paper examines these issues and…

This article reports on a project which was undertaken in 2006 to investigate the current modes and methods for delivering reference services in Australian academic libraries. The project included a literature review to assist in providing a definition of reference services as well as a snapshot of statistics showing staff and patron numbers from…

Academic reference librarians continually observe that many students are embarrassed about not knowing how to use the library and are reluctant to approach the reference desk. The theory of library anxiety offers an explanation, proposing that a fear of being in and using libraries serves as a psychological barrier, hindering many university…

Describes an investigation that assessed the effectiveness of Australian indexing and abstracting services in their bibliographic control of the literature of library and information science. Conclusions about the coverage of the literature are presented, and methods for improvement are suggested. (CLB)