Question-Negotiation and Information Seeking in Libraries: A Timeless Topic in a Timeless Article

David A. Tyckoson is Associate Dean at California State University, Fresno; e-mail: [email protected]. © 2015 David A. Tyckoson, Attribution-NonCommercial (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) CC BY-NC. It has been almost 50 years since Robert Taylor published this classic article in C&RL; yet much of what that article discussed is as fresh today as it was back then.1 As Taylor wrote, “Without doubt, the negotiation of reference questions is one of the most complex acts of human communication” (180). Of course, that is what makes it a classic—it has enduring themes that have prevailed over time. Taylor’s article is still being frequently cited—and this is by no means the first time that it has been identified as a classic. In a 2009 article on the most highly cited articles in Library and Information Science, the authors used the Web of Science database to analyze all of the more than 82,000 papers in the Web of Science subject category of Information Science and Library Science (ISLS).2 In that universe of source material, Taylor was found to be the 17th most cited ISLS article. Given the tendency of Web of Science to focus more on the hard sciences than other disciplines, most of the top articles were either information retrieval or computer science papers. In fact, Taylor is the only one in the top 82 that used any variation of the word library in its title. Based on that Web of Science data, Taylor’s paper is the single most cited library science journal article of all time. My own similar analysis of the Taylor article in Fall 2014 found 364 citations in the Web of Science—and more than 1,000 in Google Scholar. Interestingly, the rate of citation per year has risen over time rather than declined. There were more citations to Taylor in 2011 than in any other single year—and more citations in the last decade (2005–2014) than in any single prior decade. Very few articles in our discipline have either the quantity or the longevity of citation relevancy as Taylor’s paper. This is clear evidence that Taylor’s work remains relevant. The methodology that Taylor used was very innovative for its time. Instead of taking surveys, Taylor conducted in-person interviews with researchers about the processes that they used to find information in real life. He also had a class of undergraduate students log their own process of searching for information while working on a project. This approach focused on actual behaviors of users (and librarians) and anticipated many of the anthropological and ethnographic research studies that are being conducted today. Based on the information obtained from those interviews and research logs, Taylor created a hierarchy of levels of understanding that can be applied to any research query. These include the actual, unexpressed need (visceral need); the conscious, within-brain description of the need (conscious need); the formal statement of that need (formalized