Oranges and Peaches: Understanding Communication Accidents in the Reference Interview

Abstract

Librarians often have brief communication accidents in attempting to understand reference questions as they are initially presented. In this linguistic analysis, examples obtained largely from self-reports by librarians were ana lyzed for evidence of phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic anomalies. These were classified into four main categories: (1) no-harm done examples (usually caused by acoustic failures); (2) unrecognized librarian-originated accidents (usually in volving pronunciation variants or homophones); (3) sec ondhand communication accidents (where the user repeats an earlier misunderstanding; and (4) creative reconstruction (where the user reconstructs the meaning of a forgotten term). The results may assist librarians in understanding the linguistic reasons for common input failures and in learning communication strategies de signed to avert or repair such accidents. Specific interview techniques are recommended: restatement, open or neu tral questions, and follow-up questions. This study is part of a larger investigation in which discourse analysis is used to examine ill-formed queries for evidence of library users' mental models of information systems.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.