Documents, Dialogue and the Emergence of Tertiary Orality

Introduction: This investigation opens with a description of why studying non-traditional, oral documents can inform efforts to extend traditional library and information science practices, of description, storage, and retrieval, to artefacts made available through emerging media. Method: This study extends the method used to identify a document, by determining whether an artefact incorporates one or more properties of documents, to identify how a document can incorporate a dialogue. Analysis: One type of oral document, a managerial decree, a video blog, and an oral history, made up each of three cases. Analysis of one property that each document incorporates facilitates an explication of how dialogue contributes to evidence of that property emerges. Results are also analysed across cases. Results: Analysis reveals that dialogue contributes to a property of document in each of the three cases examined. Results lead to discussions regarding the extension of library and information science practices to information that becomes available in non-traditional media; formal and informal information sources; the information life cycle; oral information and context; and, the ideas of oral information literacy and tertiary orality. Conclusions: The author recommends future research to (1) determine whether the way in which dialogue occurs in the data analysed proves exemplary across other instances of oral information provision; (2) increase understanding of oral information and documents that become available in emerging formats; and (3) determine how to extend library and information science practices to that information. [This paper was published as part of: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, 19-22 August, 2013.]