The Complex Nature of Opening Reference Questions.

Abstract

The task faced by a reference librarian serving public is not hard to state. The reference librarian must provide connec tion between mind of an inquirer and knowledge stored in library. The inquirer impresses himor herself on librarian by means of a question or series of questions framed more or less well. Such questions may be written, but more often they are stated orally. Oral questions may come to librarian over phone, but quite often they are posed by an in quirer face to face with librarian. With another person bodily present and requesting assistance, reference librar ian has a task similar in many ways to that of other professional and nonprofessional interpersonal workers outside library. Such a worker must first of all gain confidence of person requesting assist ance and then, in order to be successful in ultimate task, must maintain other person's confidence long enough to pro vide needed assistance. The librarian may gain and keep an in quirer's confidence in short encounters typical of interpersonal reference situa tions through intentional control of body movement and stance, facial expression, voice modulation, and other signals, largely nonverbal, that reveal librar ian's attitude to inquirer. It is hearten ing to find librarians concerned enough with nonverbal communication and its ef fect in interpersonal situations to have re viewed general research on subject and to suggest possible applications to ref erence situations.1 There is a danger, however, in overemphasizing part nonverbal communication can play in transfer of knowledge assisted by ref erence librarian. All nonverbal signal ing of empathy and hoped for percep tion of good intentions still leave librarian to deal with inquirer's ques tion. That question comes out of other person's mind, assumed to be rational, and must be made to fit into knowl edge structure of library, also assumed to be rational. In a general review of reference litera ture, William Katz has described lack of specificity in opening reference questions as the average complaint of almost every working reference librar ian.2 This truism has been confirmed by at least one formal study of opening refer ence questions as compared to corresponding questions subsequently negotiated.3 Missing from these and other such studies, however, is a rational expla nation of generality of opening ques tions. Often use of general questions is attributed to attitudes deriving from sociocultural interpersonal psychological situation. Motivations of pride, fear, and/or shame are often invoked.4 The pur pose of present study is to review communication theory models and some of literature from philosophy and linguis tics in an attempt to supply a rational explanation for generality of opening reference questions. Suggestions are also offered for application of such an understanding of reference questions to task of assisting in access to stored knowledge.

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 — 20 citations exist upstream.

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