| As the concept of the "digital library" matures, these systems are evolving from simple WWW-accessible indexes for unorganized documents, to applications more closely duplicating the services of a physical library. These expanded services generally require considerable human intervention, for example, to organize documents into semantic categories or to formally catalog documents. The New Zealand digital library project has experi-mented with the provision of formal reference services for its computer science collection, by having a human subject expert use email to respond to client queries submitted via a form-based web page. This technique is relatively straightforward and simple to implement; however, its asynchronous nature does not support the intensive conversational interaction usually found in face to face reference interviews. In addition to providing a useful service for puzzled clients, an online reference service can also give digital library developers an insight into the problems experienced by their users' information that is otherwise difficult to obtain. This information can be useful in tailoring the collection and the digital library services to the target user group. |