Conversation Repository for Participatory Librarianship

The goal of this study is to model conversation data from digital reference services and reconstruct the processes of the reference interviews as a conversation repository. By doing so, I am hoping that the study will provide an infrastructure for applications such as an interactive information retrieval system, a question answering system, or a recommender system for information intermediaries. While the current study focuses on the digital reference conversation, observations may be generalizable, to a certain extent, to different online conversations such as blogs, question answering sites, social networking sites, or product review systems, and thus contribute to a wider range of knowledge sharing and knowledge creation through information technologies. This work is a part of the Participatory Librarianship research initiative, proposed by Lankes et al. (2006), which seeks an implementation of library as a facilitator of technology-enhanced human communication and knowledge creation, based on Gordon Pask???s Conversation Theory. (Pask, 1975, 1976