Bernie Sloan

Bernie Sloan has studied electronic reference services for nearly five years, first with e-mail reference services, and then with live chat-based reference services. He has published several articles on digital reference services. One of these articles (Electronic Reference Services: Some Suggested Guidelines, Reference and User Services Quarterly 38:77–81, Summer 1998) is being used by the Standards & Guidelines Committee of ALA's Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) as a basis for developing formal guidelines for the support of digital reference services. He also maintains a bibliography on digital reference services at www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/digiref.html. Bernie began his professional career as a reference librarian in public libraries and cooperative library systems. More recently, he served as the evaluation consultant for the "Ready for Reference" project, a live 24/7 reference service pilot offered by eight libraries in the Alliance Library System in Illinois.