Introduction

Since the internet has broadened its scale and dissolved physical boundaries, there is huge competition among professionals to bring their business to cyberspace. There is plenty of evidence in the literature to confirm that librarians have also marched into this new space, particularly in their effort to reach their clients to provide a much-needed online real-time reference service. Coffman (2003) describes this new trend: ‘In a little less than 4 years, thousands of librarians got out from behind the desk, opened up their shops on the internet, and made ready to answer patron questions live and in real time.’ Bakker (2002) states that ‘since the year 2000 there's been an explosion of interest in the library world of adapting chat technology’. However, this explosion has hardly travelled beyond the northern hemisphere and most of these librarians who have shops in cyberspace are from developed countries. Therefore, in spite of the abundance of literature on online real-time reference, very little has been published on such efforts in the developing world.

The statement by Alemna and Cobblah (2005) that ‘information technology is expanding throughout Africa but at a slower pace, yet with intense efforts directed towards training and implementing more automation’ describes a situation common to most countries that suffer from shrinking library budgets, technological drawbacks, user resistance, etc. E-mail versions of online reference services may have been tried by quite a number of librarians in these countries, but there is hardly any evidence of evaluation studies being undertaken to identify the usability and effectiveness of such a service. The time has arrived for librarians in the developing world to think seriously about how they can actively participate in the investigation of technological alternatives to in-person, face-to-face reference, which is becoming obsolete at a rapid pace.

Why do librarians have to go online?

The number of questions coming in to library reference desks is declining and more and more of our patrons are turning to the web to look for their answers (Bakker, 2002). A discussion has already commenced, and is continuing, on whether libraries could be replaced by the internet and its commercial reference service providers such as AskJeeves and WebHelp.