The Difference of the Semantic System between Reference Librarians and Users in a Reference Interview with the Hermeneutic Approach: A Case Study of National library and Archive Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

This paper is supposed to determine librarian's perception from user needs and user's understanding from librarian response in a reference interview by the hermeneutic approach and deals with "the process of understanding a work" and also How to get a sense of various phenomena e.g. Speech, behavior, written texts and works of art. This study is a functional one and the proposed method is survey with analytic approach to achieve needed data. To verify validity, the questionnaire of study was distributed among information science lecturers and to evaluate reliability of study questionnaire, Cronbach’s alpha was computed as 0.953. The librarian study population including five thematic sections was evaluated based on census method are the National library and Archive Islamic Republic of Iran. User research population with a master's degree and PhD in four thematic halls of the National Library, which is 48 people to the questionaire in the period from September 2014 to March 2015 randomly responded. The analysis shows that in most variables, there is a significant relationship between librarians and users semantic system except the reference librarian to meet the need for information sharing question and level of previous knowledge of the subject librarian and user search. Users do not understand the subject matter of their research, and also librarian in the reference interviews and user's needs have the necessary skills and understanding. Despite the lack of

Keywords

• reference services
• reference interview
• semantics
• system
• hermeneutics