• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.207-221
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• 2009

Reference services that use e-mail to receive reference questions and provide responses were developed as early digital reference services in the library field. However, librarians and users found that e-mail based reference services had some weak points when compared with traditional face-to-face reference services. As a result, libraries have started to create real-time reference services, which are similar to traditional face-to-face reference services through the use of synchronous chat software. Such chat reference services are focus of this paper. This paper approaches chat reference services as one of the services provided by libraries. Based on the understandings of the unique characteristics of services and the concept of "service quality", this paper tries to suggest appropriate marketing strategies of chat reference services.