Study of Intermediary Elicitations During Search Interview

• Main Authors: Chiang, Hsing-Jung, 姜杏蓉
• Other Authors: Wu, Mei-Mei
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/46009043044096404376

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 資訊與圖書館學系 === 89 === Search interview is the communication process that intermediaries use the question-answer process to understand users'' information needs. In 1970s, library began to provide information retrieval services, and intermediaries were substituted for users to search information through retrieval systems. In order to clarify the users'' real needs, intermediaries must interview with users to understand what are the users'' real questions. Thus, search interview has become an essential process. A study of intermediary elicitation during search interview can better understand how intermediaries interact with users, and how to make use of their professional knowledge to solve users'' information needs, and it also can provide an important contribution to the development of better interactive IR systems. The research employed observation, discourse analysis, and content analysis to collect and analyze 25 user-intermediary interactions. The results show elicitation behavior of intermediaries is the important phenomenon during search interview. A total of 863 intermediary elicitations were identified within and divided into 10 categories. The elicitation contents of intermediaries included information problem, user background, terms, search strategy, previous search history, procedure question, outputs, IR knowledge, other language purposes, and indiscernible. Intermediary elicitations were primarily focused on eliciting terms and outputs from the users, composing 24.9% of all the intermediaries'' elicitation purposes. The results show intermediaries concern about selection of terms and making relevance judgments from users. The transition sequence from one type of intermediary elicitation to another is also investigated. The main sequences of intermediary elicitations are the transition from outputs to outputs (12.5%) and terms to terms (11.8%). The results show intermediaries tend to ask users strings of some type elicitation at the same time. Furthermore, the research also find individual intermediary ask users the same type elicitation, but occur frequency is different. The research concludes by suggestions for both intermediaries interview skills improvement as well as IR system design.