Abstract
At present, digital reference services (DRS) are considered to be important for any library. DRS are already in widespread use around the world, and many interesting researches on DRS have been conducted. On the other hand, full-scale surveys about DRS have not been conducted in Japan. Accordingly, I conducted a research on what kind of DRS are being supplied in Japan and what librarians in Japanese university libraries think about DRS. This paper reports the summary of a survey of reference librarians in university libraries of Japan, asking them about their experiences with and attitudes towards the use of digital and network technologies and resources in reference work. A total of 1, 013 questionnaires were sent to the librarians of 301 universities, and responses were obtained from 412 institutions (response rate, 40.7%). Among the respondents, 66.7% reported that their library was currently offering a digital reference service. The results of the research revealed that e-mail and web forms were the most popular digital technologies for receiving and answering reference questions. As resources, OPAC and network resources were used very often as reference tools. This survey shows that DRS is in use in Japanese university libraries; however, as this is only a basic research, more research is needed to further discuss the use of DRS in Japan.
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