Abstract: With the coming of big data era, data has become the foundation of research paradigm. Data-intensive research paradigm has put forward higher requirements for the reference service of digital library. This paper expounded the necessity of research on the reference service of digital library oriented to data-intensive research paradigm, and analyzed the connotation development, and built the reference service model, and put forward the optimizing approach, so as to improve the efficiency of digital library's reference service and enable it to serve the research work better.