The Program Planning Group and all of us here tonight are very grateful to the Council of Library Directors for their support of this symposium. It is not often that CSU librarians from each of the 23 campuses are invited to come together, as if on retreat, to hear presentations and to discuss together new ways of meeting the information needs of our academic communities.
On behalf of the Program Planning Committee, I welcome you to Going Where the Students Are: A Symposium on Live Reference in the CSU. I also want to thank the librarians who have worked with me to envision and plan this event. We see the symposium as a unique opportunity to get together to hear about cooperative digital reference services already underway and to consider the possibility of cooperating together across the CSU to offer expert, real-time, interactive, reference assistance to our students over the Internet.
We started out as a group of local CSU librarians discussing a response to an RFP from the Institute for Teaching and Learning in the Chancellor’s Office. Through the beneficence of the Library Directors, we were able to fashion our ideas into a program for CSU colleagues on an important trend in reference services that goes by various names, among them live reference, reference chat, and digital reference.
There is considerable interest among us in taking reference service to the Internet as demonstrated by the fact that some CSU libraries have joined the MCLS 24/7 Reference project, CSU Pomona and Los Angeles, and others are considering this option. CSU San Jose and Monterey Bay have joined the Bay Area Project. We hope that this symposium will inspire more CSU libraries to experiment with digital reference services.
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Diane Nester Kresh
received her BA in Theater and
MLS degrees from the Catholic University of America..
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She is Director for
Public Service Collections at the Library of Congress, overseeing a staff
responsible for 15 of the Library's reading rooms including the historic Main
Reading Room and for custody and security of more than 113 million items in the
Library's general and special collections.
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She is also directs
the Collaborative Digital Reference Service which is engaged in building a
global, Web based, reference service among libraries and research
institutions.
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Diane is a frequent
speaker at professional meetings and conferences and the author of several
articles on digital reference services.
As our Keynote Speaker, Diane sets the stage,
describing the context for live reference, the opportunities, and the
challenges, and drawing from her experience with the Collaborative Digital
Reference Service. Welcome, Diane.