Study On Some Related Issues Of Standardization In Digital Reference

Libraries around the world provide different digital reference services on the web to satisfy the users' diversified information needs. In a distributed environment, digital reference systems need open, interoperability and integration. Standardization is the basic and most important issues in this point. The major research work and contributions of this paper are as follows:(1)The meaning of standardization of digital reference is clarified and the significance of standardization is indicated.(2)Some mostly research work are introduced and compared at home and abroad, such as QuIP, KBIT and QATP.(3)The paper puts forward a concept of "question life cycle" innovatively and analyzes each phase of "question life cycle" particularly and their corresponding workflows in some typical digital reference systems. Based on above, the paper summarizes main standardization issues in each phase of "question life cycle" of digital reference.(4)In view of "question life cycle" of digital reference, description of basic data and system interoperability are the main standardization issues of question creation phase and their fine solutions are metadata standards and question/answer transfer protocol. Quality management is the main standardization issue of question answer phase and its fine solution is quality control and evaluation. Conservation and utilization of question/answer records is the main standardization issue of question conservation phase and its fine solution is knowledge base standards. Their components and features are discussed particularly. Aimed at these main standardization issues, some projects like VRD, CDRS/QuestionPoint and some organizations like NISO are involving to explore what standards are needed to facilitate the development and implementation of digital reference services and give some proposed standards. In addition, Distributed Reference Services Mechanism Project of CSDL in China makes great efforts and gains much experience.(5)At last, the paper analyzes the trends of standardization of digital reference, and gives some advice to the development of standardization of digital reference in libraries in China.