Intermediary's Elicitation and Patron's Retrieval Satisfaction

[[abstract]]An elicitation is a verbal request for information reflecting one's interests, concerns or perplexities in conversation. Elicitation behavior in studies of information retrieval interaction is, in fact, the micro-level of information-seeking behavior in which the user and the intermediary exchange information to fill the gaps in one's internal state of knowledge. This study aims to understand the intermediary's elicitation behavior in terms of linguistic forms, communicative functions (illocutionary force) and utterance purposes (semantic contents) and further to identify the relationship between intermediary's individual differences and search results satisfaction. Research methods include participatory observation, conversation analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis of elicitation frequencies and questionnaires. Our research results successfully identify the three dimensions of intermediary's elicitation behavior and characterize intermediary's inquiring minds and elicitation styles. Further analysis shows that there exists a significant relationship between inquiring minds/elicitation styles and user's relevance judgment of search results.

“Who Needs To Know?”: How Different Aspects Of The User\u27s Situation Are Important For Answering Different Query Types

Prior research has established that various aspects of the user’s situation, collectively called the user model, affect what information is relevant. The purpose of our research is to refine this idea by exploring how different aspects of the user model are salient for different question types. Our methodology follows tradition in studying real intermediary elicitations for clues about what aspects of the user model are important, except that we analyze how this differs across question types. We find that there are more elicitations about the background of the user’s task and about the relevance of particular information for longer-answer questions than for short-answer questions, but surprisingly, no more elicitations regarding the sufficiency of particular information. The practical application of our research is to guide human or automated respondents to focus on the user details that are most important for different types of question

Toward a Generalized Model of Biomedical Query Mediation to Improve Electronic Health Record Data Retrieval

The electronic health record (EHR) is an invaluable resource for medical knowledge discovery. EHR data interrogation requires significant medical and technical knowledge. To access EHR data, medical researchers often rely on query analysts to translate their EHR information needs into EHR database queries. The conversation between the medical researcher and the query analyst is an information needs negotiation; I have named this process biomedical query mediation (BQM). There exists no BQM standard to guide medical researchers and query analysts to effectively bridge the communication gap between these medical and technical experts. The current practice of BQM likely varies among query analysts. This variation may contribute to the delivery of EHR data sets with varying degrees of accuracy. For example, a query analyst may return an EHR dataset that misrepresents the medical researcher’s information need or another query analyst may return a different EHR dataset to the medical researcher for the same information need. The process used to formulate the medical researcher’s information need and translate that need into an executable EHR database query may have severe downstream consequences affecting the reliability and quality of EHR datasets for medical research. This dissertation contributes early understandings of the BQM process and thereby improves the transparency and highlights the complexity of BQM by completing five studies: 1) survey the literature from other information intensive scientific disciplines to identify knowledge and methods potentially useful for BQM, 2) perform a review of existing tools and forms for assisting researchers in BQM, 3) perform a content analysis of the BQM process, 4) conduct a cognitive task analysis to detail a generalized workflow, and 5) develop an enriched concept schema to capture comprehensive EHR data needs. This dissertation employs extensive qualitative methods using grounded theory, expert interviews, and cognitive task analysis to produce a deep understanding of BQM. Additionally, I contribute a promising concept class schema to represent medical researchers’ EHR data needs to help standardize the BQM process

Further research in double interaction: the simultaneous conduct of man–man and man–computer interaction

Double interaction is the abbreviation for the simultaneous conduct of man–man interaction on the one hand, and man–computer interaction, on the other. It is a recent development—certainly in this country—and roughly follows chronologically, the advent of the computer, and subsequently, the development of man–computer interaction… The general concept of double interaction is new and extends over a wide variety of situations. The objectives of research in this field are therefore necessarily different, from the painstaking systematic research devoted to a small component feature derived from a well-established field, which one often sees in doctoral dissertations. For double interaction, the lack of an established literature as well as far-ranging implications associated with too rapid an application of a new technology, leads to a different set of objectives. The need here is for an outline of the major parameters relating to double interaction over a wide variety of situations, how these parameters may interrelate, and how one or more of these parameters may be exploited to give rise to effective planning and application of double interaction. The need therefore is more of a general nature, the overall objective being the provision of the means for understanding, designing, and implementing effective double interaction situations

Practitioner experiences in academic research libraries: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of reference work

This study explores the phenomenon of reference work from the perspective of practitioners. The objectives are to analyze in-depth the attitudes, values, beliefs, stories, and thoughts of a group of academic reference librarians working in the research library context; to identify commonalities and diversity of experience among the participants; and to relate these experiences to the intellectual traditions that have been explored in the literature. Reference work is often studied and taught as a series of behaviors. Standards for reference work, such as the RUSA Guidelines for Behavioral Performance of Reference and Information Service Providers, and evaluation studies tend to focus on specific behaviors. While the behaviors that constitute reference work are important to examine, understand and assess, they do not account for a complete understanding of the phenomenon. The concept of reference work as understood by practicing reference librarians is also an important dimension. In other professions, such as teaching, counseling, nursing, and social work, decades of research on practitioner beliefs have contributed to a rich understanding of how professionals approach their work. This understanding has been used to improve professional education and continuing education. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), a method fairly new to library and information science (LIS), the study interprets the experience of reference work for eight academic research librarians. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews and analyzed following the multi-stage IPA analysis process. Five themes emerged from the data to express the experience of reference work for this group: importance of the user, variety and uncertainty, fully engaged practice, sensations of reference work, and sense of self as reference professional

Intermediary's Elicitation and Patron's Retrieval Satisfaction

詢問是一個人心思的反映，反映一個人當時的興趣、關切的事物、困擾或面對的困難。詢問行為在資訊檢索互動研究中，可視為微觀的資訊尋求行為，讀者和中介者透過彼此詢問和問題回應的方式來傳遞訊息，讀者詢問，使檢索問題得以獲得解答，中介者詢問，以便了解讀者的資訊需求。本研究主要目的在了解中介者詢問行為（包括詢問語句目的、詢問語句的溝通功能、詢問語句的語法形式等），並進一步探討中介者詢問行為與讀者檢索滿意度的關係。研究方法有言談分析、內容分析、問卷調查、參與觀察法及統計等，研究結果包括完成中介者詢問語句目的、功能及形式的編碼定義，歸納中介者詢問行為特質，進一步發現讀者反應的「檢索結果的相關程度」滿意情形，因中介者問話風格和詢問心智不同，而有差異。An elicitation is a verbal request for information reflecting one's interests, concerns or perplexities in conversation. Elicitation behavior in studies of information retrieval interaction is, in fact, the micro-level of information-seeking behavior in which the user and the intermediary exchange information to fill the gaps in one's internal state of knowledge. This study aims to understand the intermediary's elicitation behavior in terms of linguistic forms, communicative functions (illocutionary force) and utterance purposes (semantic contents) and further to identify the relationship between intermediary's individual differences and search results satisfaction. Research methods include participatory observation, conversation analysis, content analysis and statistical analysis of elicitation frequencies and questionnaires. Our research results successfully identify the three dimensions of intermediary's elicitation behavior and characterize intermediary's inquiring minds and elicitation styles. Further analysis shows that there exists a significant relationship between inquiring minds/elicitation styles and user's relevance judgment of search results