Serviços de referência nos sites das bibliotecas universitárias federais das capitais da Região Nordeste do Brasil

Abstract

The records of knowledge has been produced and inserted in various media aiming to preserve the history of mankind for a long time. The press was a milestone for the growth of these records, enabling the democratization of information and the need to organize the information content, thus, the library arises as an institution responsible for preserving the produced knowledge. The Universities had an important role in the evolution process of libraries by maintaining a diversified collection in areas of knowledge resulting in expansion and expertise of offered services, making it easier the retrieval of information by the user. The reference services main function is to guide the user and with the emergence of information technologies new services to join computer and internet to facilitate the interface User x library appears. The websites of University libraries are instruments that give visibility to these services, making the users of the computer aware of the services offered by the library. It is disappointing for the user to access the library site and not find the information they search, or even not to understand it. In that context, the research has as general objective to identify the reference services offered by the northeast capital federal University libraries websites, to this, the study mapped these libraries, listed the websites and described the existing reference services on them. It is characterized as a case study and adopted as data collection the observation, using a qualitative approach to its analysis. As results, it was observed that the reference services offered to users through these websites should be further explored and developed; some websites need to be restructured to facilitate access, as there is lack of information. Thus, it was realized that libraries need to undergo changes that accompany the development of Universities. We propose an extension of the research on the subject usability and information retrieval on the Websites surveyed.