| Library offers around the clock reference
help
By Emily
Silverman, Special to the Chronicle
t's 2 a.m., the Library's closed and a weary
undergraduate needs some research assistance for a paper that's
due in a few hours. But there's no need to panic - help is just
a mouse click away through a new collaboration between 10 New England
colleges and universities.
Starting this
week, the campus Library system began offering professional librarian
reference assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week in real time
via the World Wide Web. The service, known as BLC ASK 24/7, is made
possible through the joint efforts of members of the Boston Library
Consortium (BLC).
Along with the Amherst and Boston
campuses, other BLC members participating in the program are Boston
College, Boston University, Brandeis University, Northeastern University,
Tufts University, University of Connecticut, University of New Hampshire,
and Williams College.
The BLC ASK 24/7 service is staffed
by professional reference librarians located in the BLC member libraries
and by professional reference librarians from around the world.
Librarians from the BLC participating libraries will cover the BLC
ASK 24/7 service weekdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
The live reference service offers
an educational alternative to the Web search engines used by researchers
and students working at odd hours of the day or night.
Founded in 1970, the Boston Library
Consortium (http://www.blc.org)
is a cooperative association of 19 academic and research libraries.
Its purpose is to share human and information resources so that
the collective strengths of the group advance the research and learning
of the members' constituents. The BLC supports resource sharing
and enhancement of services to users through programs in cooperative
collecting, access to electronic resources, access to physical collections,
and enhanced interlibrary loan and document delivery.
For more information about the BLC
ASK 24/7 service, contact Anne C. Moore, Reference Services, 5-0148
or by e-mail (annem@library.umass.edu).
Library users can access the service
from the "Ask a Librarian" Web page (http://www.library.umass.edu/ask/).
|
