Digital reference services in national libraries: A study of the british library, library of congress, russian state library and national library of france

The present study aimed to examine and assess the existing status of digital reference services provided in select national libraries. The web content analysis method was used to explore the range of digital reference services provided by the libraries. The relevant and required data has been collected by compiling a list of different assessment criteria followed by separate checklists of all the four select libraries. The study revealed that the Library of Congress is in advance of all the four select national libraries because it provides virtual library tours, video conferencing services, bulletin boards service, and search engine reference service. Moreover, only the Library of Congress can provide all the referral services and delivers the maximum number of e-mail based reference services. Notably, it has been also found that Inter-Library Loan is a common practice in libraries however bulletin board service is not adopted with full gusto. Libraries prefer to cooperate in offering services as they all are capable to deliver consortia-based resources to the users and they offer chat reference services as a means of providing real-time reference services.