hlformation Processing & Management. Vol. 32. No. 6, pp. 709-717. 1996 Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0306-4573196 $15.00 + 0.00

HI : S0306-4573(96)00024-6

T H E O P T I M I Z A T I O N O F O N L I N E S E A R C H E S T H R O U G H T H E

L A B E L L I N G O F A D Y N A M I C , S I T U A T I O N - D E P E N D E N T

I N F O R M A T I O N N E E D : T H E R E F E R E N C E I N T E R V I E W A N D

O N L I N E S E A R C H I N G F O R U N D E R G R A D U A T E S D O I N G A

S O C I A L - S C I E N C E A S S I G N M E N T

CHARLES COLE, LYNN KENNEDY and SUSAN CARTER Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Elborn College, University of Western Ontario,

London, Ontario, Canada, N6G I HI

(Received 12 February 1996; accepted 30 April 1996)

Abstract--An important user group in academic libraries is the undergraduate student seeking information for coursework in the social sciences. With the proliferation of electronic databases, a major challenge for reference librarians is to conduct a quick and effective reference interview to determine the undergraduate's information need while also providing instruction on using the information system. The present article proposes a reference- interview strategy that will allow the reference librarian to (l) efficiently assess the information need of the undergraduate, (2) label the information need, and (3) assign the most appropriate search strategy to satisfy this need. Copyright © 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd

INTRODUCTION

A large portion of the reference librarian's time in an academic library is devoted to assessing and satisfying the information needs of undergraduates. The assessment, beginning with the user's question, frequently requires a reference interview wherein the librarian "negotiates" (i.e. clarifies, expands, or probes) the need. The librarian's probing goes in two directions.

(1) Into the question itself--What is the undergraduate really asking? What is the real information need here?

(2) Into the answer--What sources of information in the library and elsewhere may contain the answer?

In the traditional formulation of the reference librarian's role in such a situation, the focus is on the "question" and finding out the real information need of the undergraduate. However, the presence of electronic databases (CD-ROMs, OPACs, Internet, and services such as Dialog), and computer workstations to access them, has changed the reference interview. A "third party" enters the reference negotiation--the "computer" (which includes the whole information system attached to it) (Saracevic et al., 1990, p. 51).

The "computer" changes the dynamic of the traditional reference interview in several ways.

(1) It changes the question: the undergraduate may include it in the question as a possible source of information.

(2) It adds an important instructional component to the interview, which takes an enormous amount of the reference librarian's time according to a recent poll of American Research Libraries (ARLs) (Barbuto & Cevallos, 1994, p. 61; see also Tedd, 1995, p. 92, for a similar overview of the British experience).

(3) And finally, because in theory the computer favours end-user searching, freeing up the librarian's time, but in practice it doesn't (because it demands more of the librarian's time for instruction, servicing, and administration), the computer may shift the objective of the reference interview in the direction of making the undergraduate self-reliant in searching

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for information. Search terms from the undergraduate's reference question become an instructional tool, an example of how the system works. When the system works (i.e. when it produces a list of citations that are more or less on topic), the reference interview is considered a success, even though from the undergraduate's point of view there are reasons (according to so-called objective standards) that it should not be (Hepworth, 1992; Lancaster et al., 1994).

The purpose of the present article is to propose a reference-interview strategy that pushes the centre of the reference interview back towards the question and the user and away from the systems-answer paradigm (for a description of the new, alternative or user-centred paradigm, cf. lngwersen & Pejtersen, 1986; Dervin & Nilan, 1986). The strategy is designed for an undergraduate researching an assignment for a course in the social sciences that requires the use of an electronic database (CD-ROM, Intemet, OPAC, etc.).

The reference-interview strategy presented here is based on the authors' own experience on assessing the information needs and conducting online searches for third-year history students at the University of Western Ontario and is a compilation of a series of hypotheses or assumptions that will be tested and modified in later stages of the research programme.

The reference-interview strategy is divided into three sections, each of which will be discussed separately.

Section 1. Understanding the information need: negotiations between librarian and under- graduate

Section 2. Labelling the information need: a diagnostic tool Section 3. Invoking the appropriate online search strategy

SECTION 1. UNDERSTANDING THE INFORMATION NEED: NEGOTIATIONS BETWEEN LIBRARIAN AND UNDERGRADUATE

Of the many approaches to analysing the reference interview, this article focuses exclusively on the librarian's goal-directed task of negotiating the reference question to determine the information need of the user (cfo Richardson, 1995, for a recent overview of reference-interview literature; for a review of the empathetic attributes of the reference interview, cf. Auster & Lawton, 1984).

The role of the reference librarian in assessing the user's information need has been described by Taylor (1962, 1968) in his classic "early" articles on question negotiation. Taylor (1968) is one of the most highly cited sources in the reference field (Richardson, 1995, p. 100), and his view of information need as an "absolute category", with a definite "internal, psychological basis for this category", (Belkin & Vickery, 1985, p. 13), is still the benchmark description of the structure of the reference question and how the librarian should dig down under it to get at the user's real information need (Saracevic et al., 1988, p. 163; Durrance, 1995; cf. Lynch (1977), for a criticism of Taylor's applicability in an academic library, and Markey (1981), for a criticism of Taylor's applicability in the online pre-search interview).

Taylor argued that, when users ask a reference question, they do not ask for what they actually "need" because (I) they do not consciously know what it is they need and thus cannot ask for it and (2) they believe that information systems (the library, the librarian, the software that interfaces the electronic database they wish to use) require them to "encode" their need "up" into an appropriate level of language and topic conceptualization. Reasons for users going through this encoding procedure in the library have been widely examined (cf. Neill, 1984; Dewdney, 1986; Mellon, 1986; Richardson, 1995). Here, because of the specific nature of the reference- interview situation being studied, it is accepted as given that the user encodes the reference question in relation to an electronic database that the user has heard about in class or by some other means.

The task of the reference librarian, according to Taylor, is to work back from the user's compromised "encoded" expression of the information need to the user's real information need,

Dynamic, situation-dependent information need 711

which is "inexpressible" and does not exist "in the remembered experience of the inquirer" (Taylor, 1962, p. 392; 1968, p. 182); the need exists as an "area of doubt" (Taylor, 1968, p. 179; cf. the subsequent research of Belkin (1990), Dervin & Dewdney (1986), and Kuhlthau (1993), who have used a variation of "area of doubt" in their definitions of the term "information need").

In certain respects, the librarian's role of digging down into the user's area of doubt is similar to what a doctor does to diagnose a patient's area of pain. The doctor makes a series of what are called "differential" diagnoses, arrived at by relying on experience, intuition and a medical textbook which sets out (1) the clinical manifestations that go with each disease, (2) the set of possible alternative diseases with roughly the same manifestations, and (3) the appropriate treatment for the disease (e.g. Harr ison ' s Principles o f ln terna l Medicine, 1994).

Because Taylor links the user's reference question to the user's information need, it is tempting to use his conception of levels to label the information need like a doctor uses a medical textbook. However, the levels do not do this: they only serve to describe the structure of the reference question and relate it to the structure of the information need. The actual labelling tool in Taylor's theory is what he calls the "five filters". Each filter corresponds to areas of questions the librarian should ask the user in order to come up with an effective strategy for finding information that will satisfy the user's information need.

Except for the first filter, the filters are concerned with the "answer" to the reference question (i.e. what would be the most appropriate "answer" given the profile of the user), not the information need itself. There is no diagnostic tool in Taylor's theory telling the librarian what to look for and how to put the evidence gathered from the five filters together into a diagnosis, as there is in medicine. This means the reference librarian is left essentially to experience and intuition during question negotiation with the user. For the present purposes, this is the first major problem with using Taylor's four levels of information-need/question-formulation and his "five filters" as a diagnostic tool to label information needs.

The second major problem with using Taylor's model for labelling information need is its impracticality. The foundation of Taylor's theory is that the "real" information need of the user is "unconscious", inherently inexpressible by the user. Since the user cannot know the real information need, neither can the librarian be expected to identify it. The result is that the need must remain unsatisfied at its deepest level.

The third major problem with using Taylor's four-levels/five-filters model to label information need is that the conception of information need and the librarian's role in finding it that Taylor describes has come under recent attack, and on two fronts.

(1) From information scientists who believe the user's need for information is of secondary importance in determining why people seek information (Wilson, 1981; Belkin & Vickery, 1985; Saracevic et al., 1988; Schamber et al., 1990), secondary to the more fundamental concerns of the "problem situation" or "user in a situation" (Belkin & Vickery, 1985; Dervin & Dewdney, 1986, p. 507; Saracevic et al., 1988; p. 163; Dervin, 1992, p. 66; cf. also Taylor's later work (MacMullin & Taylor, 1986) on "information use environments");

(2) From information scientists who believe that the traditional conceptualization of information need (used particularly in the design and evaluation of information-retrieval systems) is static and "monolithic", where it should be dynamic, evolving, and constantly changing. Harter's research, for example, revolves around the terms topical relevance, based on a conceptualization of information need that is static, versus psychological relevance, which is based on a dynamic conceptualization of information need (Harter, 1992, p. 610; cf. Smithson, 1994, p. 206; Ellis, 1993, p. 471; Schamber et al., 1990; Katzer & Snyder, 1990; Dervin, 1992, p. 65; Savolainen, 1993, p. 19).

The approach taken in the present article is, following Schamber et al. (1990), to conceptualize information need as being (i) situation (task or problem) dependent and (ii) dynamic (or evolving) in nature. The task is to create a labelling tool that can quickly and efficiently label such an information need.

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SECTION 2. LABELLING THE INFORMATION NEED: A DIAGNOSTIC TOOL

Current research in information science has focused on the situation of the user and views the user's need for information as dynamic and continually evolving. The specific purpose for seeking information discussed in this article is an undergraduate assignment in the social sciences. Kuhlthau studied a similar situation as one of the bases for her six-stage model of the information search process (ISP) (Kuhlthau, 1988; Kuhlthau et al., 1990; Kuhlthau, 1993). The model, along with the student's primary task for each stage, is given below (Kuhlthau, 1991, pp. 366-368).

(I) Initiation--student is handed assignment Task--the student must "recognize a need for information"

(2) Selection--student selects general area of interest Task--the student must "identify and select the general topic"

(3) Exploration--student explores material for area of interest Task--the student must "investigate information on the general topic in order to extend personal understanding"

(4) Formulation--student formulates specific topic or focus Task--the student must "form a focus from the information"

(5) Collection--student collects materials for the topic or focus Task--the student must "gather information related to the focused topic"

(6) Presentation--student presents finished assignment Task--the student must "complete search and prepare to present findings"

Kuhlthau suggests that the reference interview "might be adapted to identify unique information needs at each point in the search process" (Kuhlthau, 1991, p, 370). With the division of a student's assignment situation into a six-stage search process, each with a specific task, Kuhlthau's ISP model exemplifies both the situation-task nature of information need and the dynamic-evolving nature of information need that is talked about in theoretical research.

For each of the six stages, Kuhlthau identifies the student's "feelings", "thoughts", and "actions", which she calls "realms". Although it is feasible to create a tool for labelling or diagnosing information need based on these "realms", to be useful in a practical setting the diagnostic tool must be manageably concise. The pivotal stage is Kuhlthau's stage 4: Formulation of Topic Focus. Therefore, the six stages have been reduced to three focus-based stages only.

(1) Pre-focus stage (Kuhlthau's stages 1, 2, and 3) Primary task--the student must "investigate information on the general topic in order to extend personal understanding"

(2) Semi-focus stage (Kuhlthau's stage 4) Primary task--the student must "form a focus from the information"

(3) Post-focus stage (Kuhlthau's stages 5 and 6) Primary task--the student must "gather information related to the focused topic"

Fifty percent of the students in Kuhlthau's study never achieved focus, which, according to Kuhlthau, is the "turning point" of the search for information. It is at this point that the student's "confidence increases, confusion decreases and interest intensifies" (Kuhlthau, 1991, p. 370). These "feelings" constitute the first of Kuhlthau's three realms.

Following Saracevic and associates, who found that a user's reference question can be judged according to "clarity, specificity, complexity and presuppositions present", using a Likert-type scale (Saracevic & Kantor, 1988a, p. 211; Saracevic et al., 1988, p. 165), it is suggested that, by ranking the student's feelings, thoughts, and actions (Kuhlthau's three realms) using a Likert- like scale, an accurate assessment of the degree of focus of the information need can be made. Such a tool takes into account the changing nature of the information need, since, as Kuhlthau suggests, levels of confidence, clarity, and positive action are related to the degree of focus the student has achieved.

The scores from these scale ratings could be used to provide a contextual base for labelling

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the stages of information need for the undergraduate student doing an assignment. At present, however, the authors simply wish to emphasize the evidence for the existence of these distinct stages in Kuhlthau's ISP model and their practical potential as part of a diagnostic tool for labelling a dynamic/situation-task-dependent information need.

SECTION 3. INVOKING THE APPROPRIATE ONLINE SEARCH STRATEGY

Once the information need of the undergraduate is labelled, the next and final stage of the reference-interview strategy is the assignment of the most appropriate answering strategy to satisfy or treat the undergraduate's "area of doubt"--the real information need. For the particular type of information-seeking situation being studied here, this would entail a search strategy for an electronic database.

It is the present authors' assumption that the information need of an undergraduate seeking information for an assignment changes according to whether the undergraduate is in a pre-focus, semi-focus or post-focus stage of completing a course assignment. Each stage demands that the undergraduate perform a different task.

In the pre-focus stage of doing an assignment, the undergraduate's primary task is to "investigate information on the general topic in order to extend personal understanding" (Kuhlthau, 1991, pp. 366-368). Therefore, the undergraduate is looking for information that will serve this purpose. In a post-focus stage, the undergraduate's primary task is to "gather information related to the focused topic" (Kuhlthau, 1991, pp. 366-368), which means the information must serve this more "focused" purpose. What is the appropriate search strategy that will serve these diverse situation-task-dependent purposes?

In his later research, Taylor (with MacMullin) puts the type of information a user is looking for on a "focus continuum", which "is based on the extent to which facts are identified and associated for a situation" (MacMullin & Taylor, 1986, p. 100). What MacMullin and Taylor call "diffuse" information is useful at the beginning, in a "definitional stage", or to "gain a perspective on the situation". In contrast, precise information is required after the situation is well defined (MacMullin & Taylor, 1986, p. 100; cf. Smithson (1994, p. 218) for a discussion of this).

Taylor's conception of a "focus continuum" and his association of low focus with the need for diffuse information at the beginning of the search process is a logical and an intuitively appealing construct. Empirical studies of how users actually search electronic databases tells a different story, however.

The literature on search strategy most often focuses on two issues: (1) the quantity of citations desired or required by the user (Hickey & Prabha, 1990), and (2) the precision and recall of the search. With regards to (2), the traditional ideal for a search is high recall and high precision, but as Lancaster et al. note, it is "well known" that they are inversely related (Lancaster et al., 1994, p. 377; cf. Cleverdon, 1972, Bates, 1984, p. 45, Buckland & Gey, 1994, and Bopp & Smith, 1995, p. 115; for a dissenting view, cf. Saracevic & Kantor, 1988b, p. 190). As a result of this inverse relationship, a choice must be made between the two, and the user usually chooses "precision" (Saracevic et al., 1990). (However, in many studies set in naturalistic settings where the electronic database is real and contains hundreds of thousands of records, the absolute recall rate of the search output cannot be calculated (Tiamiyu & Ajiferuke, 1988, p. 393). It is not clear how this conceptual problem in measuring recall clouds the study of its real importance in satisfying the user's information need.)

The quantity of citations desired or required by the user has also become an area of study. Studies have focused on the number of retrieved citations or "magnitude" of the citation output at the end of the search, which has become connected to the concept of "information overload" (Wiberley & Daugherty, 1988; Saracevoc et al., 1990). Often, the number of citations aimed for is set arbitrarily, irrespective of recall-precision considerations (Bates, 1984). And search effectiveness is judged according to whether or not the pre-determined number of citations is eventually achieved. Vigil calls this the "quantitative criteria" of the search (Vigil, 1988, p. 140; cf. Hickey & Prabha, 1990). Saracevic has observed that the upper limit for the number of

714 Charles Cole et al.

acceptable citations resulting from a search is approximately 150 ( + / - 5 0 ) . Reductionism occurs beyond this limit, wherein searchers attempt to decrease the set size, often without examining the citations first. Saracevic et al. (1990, p. 54) ask "How much does it [reductionism] miss?" (For a study that looks at the question of how much the search may miss and its relation to user satisfaction, cf. Auster & Lawton, 1984, p. 98.) The users themselves, Saracevic e t al . (1990) note, are far less concerned with missed citations and recall rates than they are with (1) decreasing the magnitude of the citation output, and, in second order of importance, (2) citation precision.

The upper limit of set size that users habitually aim for has been coined "the perfect 30-item search" (cf. Bates, 1984). Kinnucan (1992) questions this operating assumption of search- strategy design in his study of set size as it pertains to judging search effectiveness. His findings indicate that although the retrieval set size interacts with other factors such as precision, the number of items alone does not significantly affect search satisfaction (Kinnucan, 1992).

"Overload", "magnitude", and other problems associated with a high recall search may be reading issues. Long lists of citations can be difficult to read and are for this reason avoided by the searcher, even though the searcher's information need would be better served with a long list of citations at the end of the search. If this is the case,

(1) the citation output could be classified or subdivided to make the list more "readable" (Hickey & Prabha, 1990); and

(2) there may be methods of reading long citation lists to avoid "overload", and these can be taught (Wiberley & Daugherty, 1988, p. 154)--evidence that searchers do not know how to read lists of citations is available in Spink (1995), where searchers did not incorporate key descriptors from the output into a revised search strategy, even though this would have raised the precision rate of the overall search (Spink, 1995, p. 169).

The present authors contend that, if the information need of the user requires high recall, involving a long list of citations, that the issue of "overload" is of secondary importance and should be resolved in the design of the output. Of primary importance is the information need of the user.

Consider a student who approaches the reference desk in the preliminary stages of researching a course assignment, requesting "information on American slavery". The reference librarian determines that the student is in a pre-focus stage of completing the assignment.

It is logical to assume that an undergraduate in this "definitional" or "low focus" end of Taylor's "focus continuum" needs diffuse information, which requires a high-recall search strategy using broad, general terms. Such a search is apt to produce a long list of citations (a broad search on "American Slavery" produced 2022 citations in the Dialog distributed database "America: History and Life"). In a traditional search, a lengthy citation list would be seen as too large and either deemed an immediate failure or arbitrarily reduced in a manner that may not reflect the user's information need. However, and ignoring "overload" issues for the moment, by labelling the undergraduate's information need as "pre-focus", an appropriate search strategy would aim for high recall.

The results of such a search would be presented to the user as a broad representation of the available information in the subject area. The user may then sift through the results to gain an understanding of the structure of the existing literature, or the user may leave the search with a recognition of the need to narrow the research topic to a more manageable level. Either way, as a result of going through the citations, there has been a shift in the user's knowledge structure that will help to eventually focus the information need. According to this paradigm, the high magnitude search has been a success.

CONCLUSION AND QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDY

A major challenge for academic reference librarians is to conduct a quick and effective reference interview to determine the undergraduate's information need, while simultaneously providing instruction on how to access the electronic database. The presence of the "computer"

Dynamic. situation-dependent information need 715

changes the dynamic of the interview, shifting it towards the answer and the system. Although a monolithic conception of the term "information need" has lost ground in recent

years, the present authors have retained the term in a reduced (situation-task/dynamic) form. The idea of retaining the concept in this form, and creating a diagnostic tool that directly labels the information need, has merit because (1) the strategy starts from the user and is therefore user/question-oriented not answer/system-oriented, and (2) it gives the reference librarian direct instructions on how to label the information need for immediate use. Thus, there is a direct link between the assessment of the information need and what the librarian should do to satisfy it.

For such a diagnostic tool to be useful, the process of labelling must be quick, automatic, and based on clear criteria. Given the type of users the present authors wish to study (undergraduates), a modified version of Kuhlthau's ISP model may be an appropriate diagnostic tool with which to assess the "situation-task determined" information need, based on the measurement of such things as Kuhlthau's three "realms".

If the diagnostic tool labels the information need as "prefocus", the most effective treatment is a search strategy that aims for high recall and a large number of citations that will allow the undergraduate to explore the topic area of her assignment and to orient herself in the literature. If the information need is judged to be "post-focus", the most effective treatment is a search strategy that aims for high precision and a small number of citations. There is also an information need in between these two pools on the "focus continuum", which has been labelled "semi-focus". This stage requires further investigation, but seems most ideally suited for the theoretically valued high-recall/high-precision balance, which is difficult to achieve in practice.

The reference-interview strategy for the undergraduate student searching for information for a course assignment in the social sciences, as is proposed here, is made up of the following hypotheses or assumptions, which remain to be tested and modified over the course of the present authors' research programme.

(1) Information need is situation-task-based and dynamic. (2) The overall task of an undergraduate doing an assignment can be divided into sub-tasks:

pre-focusing, semi-focus, post-focusing. (3) The information need can be labelled according to these sub-tasks. (4) A generic search strategy that will best satisfy the particular information need can be

automatically affixed once the information need (sub-task) is labelled. (5) High-recall search strategy is best for an undergraduate in a pre-focus stage of doing an

assignment, a combination of recall and precision is best for an undergraduate in a semi- focus stage, and a high-precision search strategy is best for an undergraduate in a post-focus stage.

This final hypothesis is perhaps the most problematic because, while recall is an important theoretical concept in designing and evaluating information-retrieval systems, user-focused research reveals that high recall is not of primary importance to "real" users. The user may not like to wade through a large number of citations, and may sacrifice recall considerations to decrease the number of citations (Saracevic et al., 1990). The assumption that an undergraduate should wade through a long list of citations after a high-recall search has been conducted is based on a notion of what the information need is at a pre-focus stage of the research.

Does a high-recall search strategy "contextualize" the undergraduate's topic by placing her ideas in a citation network (Fister, 1992, p. 164)? Does the undergraduate actually interact via the "computer" with the world of knowledge in the particular subject area in an almost conversational manner as suggested by Saracevic et al. (1990, p. 51). These are the sorts of questions related to information need that may be used to test the hypothesis that an undergraduate searching an electronic database at the beginning of the research process should employ a high-recall search strategy.

In this scenario, an undergraduate in a "post-focus" stage of completing an assignment has already held her conservation with the world of knowledge and come to a focus because the "computer" has allowed her to set her ideas in a citation network that represents symbolically the world of knowledge. What is needed for this undergraduate is specific, factual-type

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information that one obtains from a high-precision search strategy. A study that explores the contrast between a post-focus information need and a pre-focus information need might shed some light on the more difficult latter concept.

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