Abstract: The author carried out a questionnaire survey among the student readers in the libraries of the four campuses of Sun Yat-sen University on the reader demand for the outreach for reference service from June 13th to 16th, 2013. The result indicates that student readers mainly acquire information through Internet at the current time and have little knowledge of reference service. However, they hope outreach for reference service could be of- fered by academic library so as to provide help on their information retrieval and writing of term paper and dis- sertation. In addition, most students would like to take part in the team of providing outreach for reference service as a student assistant or volunteer.

Key words: academic library; reference service; outreach; reader demands