Ready-Reference Resources and E-Mail Reference on Academic ARL Web Sites.

This article examines the design characteristics of ready-reference and e-mail reference pages on the Web sites of 110 academic libraries in the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Ninety-two of these libraries had both ready-reference and e-mail reference sections on their Web sites at the time of the survey. Characteristics examined for each site included the wording of page titles and links, numbers of steps from the library's home page to the service pages, organization schemes, timeliness of resources or responses, and additional means of communication available between patron and librarian.