In addition to serving Congress, the Library of Congress provides reference service to the public in its 21 reading rooms and through its Web site. During the year, the Library's staff handled more than 775,000 reference requests that were received in-person, on the telephone, and through written and electronic correspondence.
More than 25,000 items from the Library's collections were circulated to Congress during the year. An additional 40,000 items were circulated through interlibrary loan to U.S. and foreign libraries and other research institutions, while nearly 1.3 million items from the collections were circulated for use within the Library.
Digital Reference. During the year, the Public Service Collections Directorate launched QuestionPoint, a new online reference service, in collaboration with the OCLC Online Computer Library Center of Dublin, Ohio. QuestionPoint provides library users with access to a growing collaborative network of reference librarians in the United States and around the world, any time of day or night, through their local libraries' Web sites. The responding library's staff member answers the question online or forwards the question to another participating library. This service, which is available to libraries by subscription, is free for library patrons. The Ask a Librarian service, by which a question can be submitted and answered within five business days via an interactive form on the Library's Web site, was initiated in April. In the first six months of the program, the service received 20,000 queries directed to the 20 teams listed on the Ask a Librarian Web page. The service, which is supported by the QuestionPoint software, includes a live chat feature that enables researchers to consult a reference librarian in real time via e-mail.
