Elicitation Behavior During Mediated Information Retrieval

Abstract What elicitations or requests for information do search intermediaries make of users with information requests during an information retrieval (IR) interaction-including prior to and during an IR interaction-and for what purpose? These issues were investigated during a study of elicitations during 40 mediated IR interactions. A total of 1557 search intermediary elicitations were identified within 15 purpose categories. The elicitation purposes of search intermediaries included requests for information on search terms and strategies, database selection, search procedures, system's outputs and relevance of retrieved items, and users' knowledge and previous information-seeking. The transition sequences from one type of search intermediary elicitation to another were also investigated. These findings are compared with results from a study of end-user questions [Nahl D. & Tenopir C. (1996) Affective and cognitive searching behavior of novice and end-users of a full-text database. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(4), 276–286] and a study of user elicitations of search intermediaries [Wu, Mei Mei (1993) Information interaction dialog: A study of patron elicitation in the information retrieval interaction. Ph.D. Dissertation. Rutgers University, New Brunswick. UMI Order Number 9320541] to develop an Information Retrieval Elicitation Task Model. Implications of the findings for the development and design of IR systems are also discussed.

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