Watanabe, Yuriko2025-09-242025-09-242014Birdsall, William F. (1994) The myth of the electronic library: librarianship and social change in America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p.44. National Diet Library (2003) Predecessors of collaborative reference services, trans. [Online] Available from: https://crd.ndl.go.jp/jp/library/documents/report_h14_oversea.pdf‎. [Accessed: 15th May 2014]. Buschman, John E. Leckie, Gloria J. (ed.) (2007) The library as place: history, community, and culture. Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited. Ueda, Takayuki (2007) Giving form to knowledge. National Diet Library Monthly Bulletin, No. 554. p.31-32. Tamura, Shunsaku (2008) Reconsider reference service, The journal of Information Science and Technology Association, 58(7). p.324-325. Kanematsu, Yoshiyuki (2012) Knowledge management tools in library services. The journal of Information Science and Technology Association, 62(7). p.291. Sakajiri, Koichi (2012) The making process and outline of the Research Navi, The Library journal, 106(4). p.248-249 Yoda, Norihisa (2013) The Collaborative Reference Database Project: its Development as Community of Practice for Reference Librarians. Journals of Informatics, 10(2). p.2. Agnoli, Antonella (2013) Le Piazze del sapere, Biblioteche e libertà, Mlano: Laterza.https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/5625Although it is true that more people are getting information through Google and libraries are receiving fewer inquiries in recent years, Google presents us not just with challenges but also with opportunities. Google affords us the opportunity to expand reference services by creating useful research content that can be made available to the public on the Internet. The NDL provides Search Guides on the Internet which are created thanks to our librarians’ experience and professional knowledge. The Search Guides consist of content that provides outlines and information resources for specific topics. The NDL now provides Search Guides for about 1,700 topics, which are available on the Internet. The Search Guides can be very effective when a topic which meets and anticipates the patron’s needs is available. To identify these needs, we utilize two databases which accumulate past inquiries and answers; the first is the intranet system “REX,” which is shared by reference librarians in the NDL, and the second is the Collaborative Reference Database, which records past inquiries and answers as well as other useful reference date obtained by Japanese libraries. The Search Guides ware created to meet the need of potential users and receives a rather large volume of traffic. Compared with the Collaborative Reference Database, a Search Guide receives 90 times as many references per item of content. This is a clear indication that preparing a model answer in advance, as in the Search Guide, provides a much more pertinent response to patrons’ questions. One of our major challenges is the maintenance of each Search Guide. Moreover, when adding content, it is necessary to integrate each field and consider how this information might be best utilized in the future.enAttribution 3.0 Unportedhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Articlehttp://conference.ifla.org/ifla80/open accessInternetSearch GuidesCollaborative Reference DatabaseReference Community Site