Changing from traditional to digital reference service: Fate of academic libraries and their users

AbstractTraditional reference services are becoming a natural approach to meet consumers' information demands in a quickly changing information ecosystem, and digital reference services are a dynamic enhancement of those services. The focus of this research is the digital reference service at the libraries of National Law Universities NLU.There have been discussions on a variety of ways to provide digital reference services, including digital robots, Ask A services, online chat reference, email, video conferencing, and collaborative digital reference. The present situation of digital reference services in the libraries of four National Law Universities (NLUs) in North India is examined in this paper, along with its benefits and drawbacks. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and compare the digital and online reference resources offered by university libraries in Northern India.