Technological advances have enabled universities to re-evaluate their ways of gathering, processing and disseminating information for teaching, research and their own administration. The librarian services offered to distance learning students was the focus of this work, which aimed to analyse the librarian's role, as well as present the services provided by libraries in distance learning, the means of communication between librarians and distance learning students and also the training of these librarians. The main results were that the bibliographic survey was the service most used by distance learning students, and that e-mail and telephone were the tools most used to communicate with these students.