Texts as Actions: Requests in Online Chats Between Reference Librarians and Library Patrons

摘要

Virtual reference services provide opportunities for library patrons to produce requests of reference librarians through quasi-synchronous computer-mediated exchanges in which requests and deliverables are produced as online textual objects. Text postings only become the actions they perform, such as an information request or deliverable, through the recipient's work of reading. Text postings thus are designed for their recipients and are built in ways that instruct particular readings. In this paper, I show that patron requests are interactional achievements co-constituted by librarians and patrons through the exchange of text postings that are designed to be seen as requests. The Reference and User Services Association offers guidelines for online interactions between librarians and patrons. However, such guidelines provide only general recommendations by which librarians may overcome difficulties in identifying the specific information needs of patrons. I examine actual chat logs of virtual reference interactions and describe how librarians engage with patrons to co-construct actionable requests to specify and fulfill patron information needs. Conversation analytic methods are used to identify the way texts are produced to instruct recipients in the ways they are to be read and how these texts serve, through reading's work, as an analysis of the actions prior texts perform.