DEVELOPING DIGITAL REFERENCE SERVICE IN SOUTH ASIA: Challenges and Issues

Abstract

The study outlines challenges of south Asian countries (particularly India, Pakistan and Bangladesh etc) to develop Digital Reference Service (DRS) and focus on issues like language diversity, poor literacy rate and digital and information divide etc being common denominator of underdevelopment at different terrains with ethnic and cultural multiplicity. The paper analyses the features of (DRS) by scanning literature and deriving inputs from existing models, experiments and guidelines for developing DRS suitable for the region.