Texting 4 Answers: What Questions Do People Ask?

This study seeks to provide empirical evidence about how users use text reference service, especially what kinds of questions they ask, to further the professional understanding of this emerging reference service venue and how to best deliver text reference service via this venue. More than three thousand transactions from My Info Quest, the first nation-wide collaborative text reference service, were studied to identify the types of information needs fulfilled by text reference. Additional analysis of characteristics such as transaction length and interactivity provides a more in-depth picture of the nature of text reference. Findings of the study will be beneficial to libraries that are interested in starting a text reference service and developing best practices.