Truing
the Wheel: Designing a refined taxonomy for virtual reference services in
academic libraries, by John Dorr & Jannelle Ruswick of the Illinois
Institute of Technology.
This poster looks at how traditional taxonomies and
classification schemes of reference questions (don’t) work with the kinds of
questions most often asked via Virtual Reference services.
The authors propose
changes to the Katz and Sears taxonomies to better reflect information needs
met via email and IM services.
The taxonomy reflects kinds of service(s)
provided. Each reference transaction can contain many different question
classifications, instead of defining the transaction by one overarching theme.
This is one of four winning posters in the 2007 MARS
Management of Electronic Resources and Services (MERS) Committee virtual poster
session on the evaluation of virtual reference services.