Text Structures and the User-Intermediary Interaction

Abstract

Reference librarians use open, closed, or neutral questions to elicit statements of need from library users. Each type of question functions differently because it provides a differ ent structure upon which responses can be based. This re search investigated questions based on the text-linguistic structure of literature, which, like neutral questions, pro vide more structure for responses than open questions and less structure than closed questions. Subjects with similar levels of familiarity with a topic completed online search request forms that used either open, bibliographic, or structural questions. Questions based on text-linguistic structure produced longer and more complete responses. These results suggest that in some reference situations, asking questions based on text structure can provide better results than either open questions or those based on ele ments of bibliographic description.

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