Meeting Reference Responsibilities Through Library Web Sites

Summary Among the many ways the World Wide Web has changed libraries are the additional tools gained by librarians and library users for answering reference questions. In addition to the growing number of licensed resources providing the full text of articles from newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and reference works are the millions of free Web sites offering an incredible variety of information about everything. Locating the most useful of these sites and organizing them into categories on library Web sites can be enormously beneficial both to patrons and libraries. After deciding to make their sites reference portals, librarians must make a number of important decisions.