Reference serves exist to maximise access to information contained in informationrncentralization. Yet human expense have not achieved this goal as they desired. But therndevelopment of the expen system technology the possibilities, have become promising.rnDemonstration of how the expen system technology could be used in enhancing thernreference services for the domain, Ethiopian Studies, in general and for EthiopianrnHistory in particular is the main theme of this thesis.For this purpose a prototype expen reference advisory system was developed followingrnthe prototyping approach using the Knowledge Pro Windows version 2.0 shell. Therninterview, protocol analysis and observation methods for acquiring knowledge from thernreference librarians: production rules for representing the acquired knowledge; backwardrnchaining for conferencing mechanism; and graphics and hypertext technology for designingrnthe user interface were employed. In addition to facts about a user's inquiry to be input to the system by the user, thernsystem has an interface with the database program from where facts about the possiblernsources are retrieved during the system's inference. The system provides the user withrnpossible sources of information or advice as well as an explanation how it reaches to itsrnconclusion and why it asks the user to input some facts. Even though, production rules are not suitable for representing individual users model.rnoverall they are found to be fining for modelling the knowledge of the reference expertsrnin the domain. Besides the interfaces features. for both user and other systems, are foundrnto be quite satisfactory. It sounds to be feasible to develop a working system based on this prototype that couldrnbe used both by the end-user and the reference librarians who are interested in therndomain. Moreover, the models. tools and approaches that are used in this study could bernused for other related domains