Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Using Text Analysis Tools To Improve Reference Faqs, James E. Van Loon

Library Scholarly Publications

A team of WSU reference librarians regularly reviews email reference questions and creates online FAQs as an aid to patrons and librarians. In the current project, text analysis tools were used to supplement the traditional process in an attempt to better understand the frequency and context of email reference queries. The presentation provides information on the text analysis tools used in the project, and presents several Q&A pairs developed using this process.