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GCN Home > May 28, 2001 issue

Faster Facts

The Library of Congress tests its virtual reference network

BY WILLIAM JACKSON | GCN STAFF

Not long ago, a patron of the Morris County, N.J., public library needed a transliteration of a Saudi place name. Local librarians couldn’t help, but they referred the question to the Collaborative Digital Reference Service.

The question went through a CDRS server in Washington at the Library of Congress, where a software agent matched it against a database of participating institutions. The query traveled to the University of Wisconsin, which was listed as having Arabic expertise, and the New Jersey patron received the transliteration in a matter of hours.

CDRS, a Library of Congress virtual network of reference services, makes experts in various fields available to patrons around the world 24 hours a day. In its third and final pilot phase, CDRS can call on more than 80 institutions, such as national libraries of medicine and agriculture in the United States; national libraries in Canada, Australia and the Netherlands; and other libraries and universities around the world.

“Eventually, the service will be direct to the end user, sitting at home or at a terminal at the library,” said Diane Kresh, director of library service collections. “But the process of coding a question right now is a little too arcane.”

Join ’em, then beat ’em

The service arose partly as a response from the world’s librarians to the challenge of the Web, whose search engines cull information from millions of sites. To remain relevant, the librarians decided to fight fire with fire and use networking to improve their reference desks.


The Library of Congress’ Diane Kresh wants to deliver data from experts over the Internet instead of looking things up one by one.
The idea was born at an international symposium in Washington in 1998, Kresh said. Proposals for a centralized reference network came up at a 1999 American Library Association meeting in Philadelphia, and the first pilot began in February 2000. It tested the routing of scripted questions based on profiles of 10 participating libraries.

Library of Congress staff routed the questions by e-mail and later by Web forms, and answers came back the same way.



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