QUESTION ANALYSIS and MODES OF SEARCHING : QUESTION ANALYSIS and MODES OF SEARCHING
Types of Questions Answered By Reference Librarians : Types of Questions Answered By Reference Librarians Factual - Soliciting reasonably simple, straight forward answers based on obvious facts or awareness. These are usually at the lowest level of cognitive or affective processes and answers are frequently either right or wrong.
Convergent - Answers to these types of questions are usually within a very finite range of acceptable accuracy. These may be at several different levels of cognition -- comprehension, application, analysis, or ones where the answerer makes inferences or conjectures based on personal awareness, or on material read, presented or known.
Evaluative - These types of questions usually require sophisticated levels of cognitive and/or emotional judgment. In attempting to answer evaluative questions, users may be combining multiple logical and/or affective thinking process, or comparative frameworks. Often an answer is analyzed at multiple levels and from different perspectives before the answerer arrives at newly synthesized information or conclusions.
Bibliographical Questions : Bibliographical Questions Catalog Lookup
Bibliographic Identification/Verification/Location/Interlibary Loan
Related Issues
Library policies and scope of collections
Connectivity/Access Issues
Database/Searching Mechanics
Directional Questions : Directional Questions These questions generally encompass the physical world:
"Where is the New York Times World Almanac?"
"Where is the copy machine?"
"Where is the Dictionary of Art?"
Being as simple as they are, they surprisingly take up about 30 - 50% of the Reference Librarians' time.
“Ready Reference” Questions : “Ready Reference” Questions These questions are single, usually uncomplicated, lines of query that generally have a simple, uncomplicated answer (factoids).
"What is the capital of Rhode Island?"
"What is the average life span of a Yellow Nape parrot?"
"What is the average flight speed of an unladen swallow (African)?"
The Ready Reference section contains almanacs, registries of journals, dictionaries, etc.
Specific Search Questions : Specific Search Questions Theses are questions that lead the user to a variety of sources that will give them a broad range of information on a topic.
"What do you have on lizard breeding?"
"Where can I find the rates of homicide, and contributing factors, for these twenty cities?"
"What information do you have on the stages of moral development?"
Research Questions : Research Questions This kind of question usually comes from an adult specialist seeking detailed information to assist her/him in a specific work. This is the kind of question that is undefined until resources can be found and evaluated, then the question is honed and a focus developed around which the researcher will continue study.
A Basic Approach To Analyzing Questions : A Basic Approach To Analyzing Questions What is the question asking?
What information have I been given?
What facts, if any, do I need to recall?
How do these facts fit with the information in the question?
Related Strategy Prompts : Related Strategy Prompts Reorganize – What is the question asking? What is the subject of the question? What important information have I been given?
Recall – What do the key words in the question tell me about the nature and subject of the question? Do I need to clarify subject terms or other specifications? What other information do I need?
Relate – How does these facts relate to the information provided in the question? Have you considered all of the information/conditions in the question?
Modes of Searching : Modes of Searching Footnote chasing (or "backward chaining”. This technique involves following up footnotes found in books and articles of interest, and therefore moving backward in successive leaps through reference lists. Note that with this technique, as with other citation methods, the searcher avoids the problem of subject description altogether. This method is extremely popular with researchers in the social sciences and humanities.
Citation searching (or "forward chaining”). One begins with a citation, finds out who cites it by looking it up in a citation index, and thus leaps forward.
Journal run. Once, by whatever means, one identifies a central journal in an area, one then locates the run of volumes of the journal and searches straight through relevant volume years. Such a technique, by definition, guarantees complete recall within that journal, and, if the journal is central enough to the searcher's interests, this technique also has tolerably good precision. In effect, this approach exploits Bradford's Law: the core journals in a subject area are going to have very high rates of relevant materials in that area.
Modes of Searching, Part 2 : Modes of Searching, Part 2 Area scanning. Browsing the materials that are physically collocated with materials located earlier in a search is a widely used and effective technique. Studies dating all the way to the 1940's confirm the popularity of the technique in catalog use.
Subject searches in bibliographies and abstracting and indexing (A & I) services. Many bibliographies and most A & I services are arranged by subject. Both classified arrangements and subject indexes are popular. These forms of subject description (classifications and indexing languages) constitute the most common forms of "document representation" that are familiar from the classic model of information retrieval discussed earlier.
Author searching. We customarily think of searching by author as an approach that contrasts with searching by subject. In the literature of catalog use research, "known-item" searches are frequently contrasted with "subject" searches, for example. But author searching can be an effective part of subject searching as well, when a searcher uses an author name to see if the author has done any other work on the same topic.