Elicitations during information retrieval: implications for IR system design
SIGIR '96 Proceedings of the 19th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Elicitation behavior during mediated information retrieval
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Proceedings of the 22nd annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Information seeking and mediated searching. Part 5. User-intermediary interaction
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Understanding patrons' micro-level information seeking (MLIS) in information retrieval situations
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
In the bookshop: examining popular search strategies
Proceedings of the 11th annual international ACM/IEEE joint conference on Digital libraries
On sociocultural aspects of user elicitation
Proceedings of the 4th Information Interaction in Context Symposium
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The current research explores how intermediaries seek information from patrons, in particular by analyzing intermediaries' elicitation utterances through three dimensions--linguistic forms, utterance purposes, and communicative functions--to determine whether indeed any dimension appeared consistently, to be called "elicitation styles." Five intermediaries from four academic libraries (three national university libraries, one private university library) and one research institute library participated in the study. Thirty patrons with 30 genuine search requests were recruited; thus, 30 patron/intermediary information retrieval interactions making a total of 30 encounters were collected. Video/audio data were taped. Dialogues between patron and intermediary were transcribed. Statistical analysis revealed three types of elicitation styles among the five intermediaries, labeled, (1) situationally oriented, (2) functionally oriented, and (3) stereotyped. This study seeks an explanation for different elicitation styles. Qualitative analysis was applied to investigate "inquiring minds." An inquiring mind is termed to represent a mentality or tendency that one elicits certain threads of questions influenced by professional beliefs, individual characteristics, tasks, goals, and interactional contexts in conversation. The results of qualitative analysis specified three modes of inquiring minds of the intermediaries, namely: (1) information problem detection, (2) query formulation process, and (3) database instructions.