Infrastructural Overview of College Libraries towards Implementation of Virtual Reference Service (VRS): A Study of North-Western India

Reference Service enables libraries to provide information to a person who needs it, either directly from an appropriate source, or indirectly by providing the person with the source or teaching him how to find the needed information in the sources. With new technologies, users' information seeking behaviour (ISB) along with their expectations from the reference service has witnessed a sea change, which motivate the Librarians to embrace the Internet as an appropriate medium for information exchange, communication, and instruction, including both synchronous and asynchronous tools and played a pivotal role in transforming the in-person desk-based TRS to VRS. Libraries in India by-and-large have implemented ILMS (e.g. RFID) for their automation but the status of VRS adoption in the Indian context is scarce barring a few cases wherein libraries are providing reference service through email or web-form (asynchronous). Thus, in the light of the above facts the present study has been planned by the researcher as a meaningful understanding and deliberate investigation pertaining to the domain of VRS. The study result reveals that although, VRS was not being offered by almost all of the libraries and Synchronous VRS (SVRS) was offered by none of the libraries under the study. It is clear from the result that the college libraries of NorthWestern India cater to the need of a heterogeneous user community as the institutions belonging to a wide variety of disciplines, enables the researcher to capture a wide range of perspectives relating to the status of VRS. Again from the study we can infer that the libraries were having basic ICT infrastructure thus making a case for implementing VRS without significant expenditure, which can resolve the shortage of sufficient staff of the libraries in near future.