No abstract

This chapter focused on sustainable reference service practices in the 21st century. The chapter discussed issues relating to overview of reference service, traditional reference services, reference resources prior ICT proliferation, reference service practices in the 21st century. Also, issues relating to 21st century reference sources/resources, advantages of electronic/virtual reference service, sustaining reference service practices in the 21st century, as well as sustainability challenges of 21st century reference service practices were all discussed. The chapter reviewed significant literature on the topic of discussion, and the researcher used Google to obtain scholarly papers from open access databases that are relevant to the study, which provided the basis for the reviewed literature.

This study examines usage of solar-inverter technology as alternative energy source: a catalyst for round the clock electronic services in Nigerian university libraries. The total population for this study comprised three hundred and seventy one (371) librarians from 40 university libraries in South West, Nigeria. The data collected were analyzed using simple percentage/frequency counts and weighted mean. Findings from this study revealed among others that the extent of librarians’ awareness of solar- inverter technology as alternative sources of energy in university libraries in South West, Nigeria is very high; electronic reference service, online interlibrary loan service, online cataloguing and classification service, OPAC service, online current awareness service, electronic indexing and abstracting service, online selective dissemination of information service, e-mail service, electronic charging and discharging service among others are types of electronic services that can be provided round the clock in university libraries in South West, Nigerian using solar-inverter energy as alternative energy source and that the extent to which solar-inverter energy can be used as alternative energy source to power ICT equipments for electronic services in university libraries in South West, Nigeria is high among other findings. Recommendations made based on the findings of the study include: University library management should make it a point of duty and also take it as priority to allocate fund for the acquisition and installation of solar-inverter technology as this will help them fulfil the library goal of rendering round the clock electronic library services to their users among others.