Neutral Questioning: A New Approach to the Reference Interview.
Brenda L. Dervin, Patricia Dewdney · 1986
This version of the paper is a pre-publication version. For final publication, some editorial corrections and changes have been made; however, the main points remain the same. One of the most important tasks of a librarian who acts as an intermediary between the inquirer and the system is query negotiation—determining what the inquirer really wants to know. This task has been described by Taylor as one of the most complex acts of human communication. [1] Although courses in interpersonal communication are becoming more prevalent in education for librarianship, there appears to be no systematic approach to teaching librarians how to conduct the reference interview. One fundamental reason for this may be the lack of an appropriate theoretical model for teaching interview techniques. In essence, what is available to the educator is a great deal of common knowledge about traditional interviewing approaches plus a potpourri of humanistic alternatives documented in library science literature. [2] The typical approach to interviewing attempts to match users to the resources. It builds on the user’s first statement by asking a series of closed questions (i.e., questions which can be answered with “yes ” or “no ” or a specification of “this ” or “that”). These closed questions are used to identify which of the system’s resources the user needs and are typically arrayed along