January 28th, 2012 Brian Herzog
This reference question happened over the course of two days. This particular patron is in the library almost every day doing anti-abortion research, so this type of question isn't actually all that unusual for us - but I thought the details were interesting.
She came up to the desk with an article quoting President Obama talking about adoptions that initiated with Planned Parenthood, and another article citing the number of abortions they perform every year. She wanted to verify each of the numbers, and then find out the ratio of abortions-to-adoptions.
I thought the most reliable place for statistics like that would be the Planned Parenthood website, so we started there. Their About Us section had a link to their Annual Reports (perfect!), and the most recent one listed was for 2009-2010.
We clicked into the report itself, and on page five we found what we were looking for:
| Health Service |
2009 |
2010 |
| Abortion Procedures |
331,796 |
320,445 |
| Adoption Referrals to Other Agencies |
977 |
841 |
Those were a little off from the numbers given in the article, but she was happy with that, and wanted me to print a copy for her records. Sounds straight-forward, right? Turns out, it's not. Planned Parenthood uses issuu.com to host their documents, and in order to print anything, I had to sign up for an issuu.com account. I did, but then had to wait for the verification email before I could print.
Our email server doesn't deliver messages instantly, because it holds them to filter out spam. And of course, all this was happening fifteen minutes before we closed, and the verification email didn't arrive in time. The next morning I verified my account and printed the information for the patron.
But she also wanted the ratio, so that was my next task. But when I asked myself, "what is the ratio of 329,445 to 841," I could not for the life of me remember how to do that. I thought I just needed to divide 329,445 by 841, but I did that on a calculator and it didn't seem right.
I thought Google could do that calculation (329,445:841), since it does others, but it didn't. Next I searched for a simple online ration calculator, but couldn't find that did what I wanted.
Then I remembered about Wolfram|Alpha, which was designed not just as a search engine, but as a computational engine. When I typed 329,445:841 into that it gave me an answer - and to my surprise, it was the same answer I got myself on the calculator.
So the answer is that, in 2010, Planned Parenthood performed 392 abortions for every 1 adoption. The patron felt this number was way low, according to other news articles she had read, but I showed her the data and the calculations. She reluctantly accept it and thanked me - I was just glad I actually remembered some of my grade school math.
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Posted under Library, Reference Question | 1 Comment »
January 26th, 2012 Brian Herzog
So, this post might not matter to anyone but me, but I felt like I should announce it anyway.
For the last few years, the blogging schedule I've stuck to was new posts every Tuesday and Thursday, and the Reference Question of the Week on Saturdays. Over the last couple months though, I've felt that I'm both running out of things to say and have less free time to work on posts, so I've decided to cut back to just one new post a week and the Reference Question on Saturday.
Not a major change I know, but it feels major to me because it's a schedule I've stuck to for so long. I know a schedule isn't mandatory for blogs, and most people probably just post only when they have something interesting to say. For me though, I think that if I didn't make myself stick to a schedule, I'd quickly slip into nothing at all.
So anyway, again, I don't know if anyone would have even noticed if I didn't say anything, but there you go.
But I am curious about the schedule/no schedule thing, both for personal and library communications. Does you're library have a set goal or schedule for blog posts, tweets, email newsletters, etc., or do you only do it when you've got something to say? In my library, it varies: I try to have a new blog post once a week, but Twitter is much more as-needed (in addition to automated tweets for library events). We have a main email newsletter that goes out once a week, but also sort of a childrens supplement which only goes out when the Childrens Room has something specific to communicate.
It seems like all models work in their context, but I'd be curious to hear if other libraries have had success following one path or another.
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Posted under Library, Personal | 6 Comments »
January 24th, 2012 Brian Herzog
I feel like I've talked about this before, but it's something that continues to puzzle me. Every week or so we find flash drives left behind in the public work stations after patrons leave - here's what we've got in our Lost & Found bin now:
Most of the flash drives we find get returned because our policy is to check the flash drive to look for a resume or something that has contact information in it.
But of the others, no one ever comes looking. And it seems that every time someone comes to the desk to ask if we found their flash drive, none of the ones we have belong to them. I find this odd.
Two other things I find interesting: one is the different kinds of drives people use (and the ones that are the same), as well as the different ways staff has of marking the drives as to when and where they were found (all our public workstations are named after authors).
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Posted under Library, Random | 6 Comments »
January 21st, 2012 Brian Herzog
This question was short and sweet, and in addition to making me laugh, left me a little confused. A patron walks up to the desk and asks:
Can you show me where the painting books are?
I asked her if she meant books on how to paint, books of paintings by famous artists, or books on painting your house, and she said the how-to books. So I took her to the 751's, and she said that was exactly what she was looking for and would browse for awhile.
I went back to the desk, and maybe five minutes later the patron came back up:
Patron: Those were okay, but not what I was looking for. Can you show me there the books are about painting with pencils?
Me: Oh sure, the drawing books are...
Patron: No, not drawing, I mean painting with colored pencils.
I had no idea what painting with colored pencils could possibly be besides drawing, so I just searched our catalog for colored pencils to see what came up. It wasn't much of a surprise that a lot of drawing books came up, so I took the patron to the 741.2's and actually found a book called Painting light with colored pencil. Again, she said that was exactly what she was looking for, and that she'd look around.
I went back to the desk a little puzzled, as I didn't know why there was a stigma on "drawing."
It must be a thing though, because a little while later the patron stopped by the desk again to thank me. When she did, I noticed she was carrying two more books: Masterful color : vibrant colored pencil paintings layer by layer and Drawing workbook : a complete course in ten lessons. But she left happy, so it was a good day.
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Posted under Library, Reference Question | 5 Comments »
January 19th, 2012 Brian Herzog
![[don't censor the web]](http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/dontcensortheweb.gif "XKCD SOPA/PIPA blackout comic")
I thought it was great how many websites participated in yesterday's blackout protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills. Partly, because I ended up explaining what was going on to quite a few people.
BoingBoing has a quickie recap of the effect the protest had on some Senators and Congressmen, and SOPATrack.com allows you to view, by State, who supports, opposes, and is undecided about the bills - also, how much money they've accepted from pro- and anti-censorship lobbyists. According to FightForTheFuture.org, there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA. Last week there were 5. Huge success, but it takes 41 to stop the bill completely.
For what it's worth, here's a few anecdotes from my day:
- A couple weeks ago, I used Senator Scott Brown's contact form to request a meeting with him to talk about PIPA. Nothing happened until yesterday, when I got a call from someone in his Boston office, thanking me for contacting them and saying Sen. Brown will oppose PIPA. That's great.
- Next I tried to contact Senator John Kerry. I called his DC office and got a busy signal, then went to his website to get the number for his Boston office - but the website was down. I found the number elsewhere online, but when I called it rang and rang then went to voicemail, but then a message said the voicemail box was full. I was disappointed I couldn't contact my Senator, but hopefully that meant that so many other constituents were contacting him that his methods were just overwhelmed.
But it's not over. The Senate vote on PIPA is still scheduled for Tuesday, Jan 24th, so keep contacting your Senators and ask them to explain the bill. Also, it looks like SOPA is scheduled to be revived in February, so also contact your Members of Congress. XKCD had a great shortlist of links to check out:
WTF Wikipedia
Of course, the funniest part of yesterday were all the tweets from people who didn't know what was going on - lots of desperate students unable to do their homework, but of course it's bigger than that. Still, they're worth a skim.
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Posted under Library, Technology | 1 Comment »
January 17th, 2012 Brian Herzog
The next Library Day in the Life is coming up - it runs the week of January 30th through February 5th. If you haven't participated, think about trying it this time - it's interesting, and a lot of fun.
I've done the last few, and plan on live-blogging one of my days for #libday8 also. If you're interested, read Bobbi Newman's explanatory post, then check out the LibDay wiki, and follow these directions:
- Chose your medium – blog posts, tweets, pictures, videos, interpretive dance, whatever.
- Go to the wiki
- Create an account (it’s free), carefully read the instructions for adding your content.
- On the 30th start recording your day or week.
- Bloggers, Flickr & YouTube users tag your posts with librarydayinthelife and #libday8. Twitters use the #libday8
- Bloggers be sure to include an introductory paragraph explaining the project and information about your position for readers.
- Add your Flickr photos or videos to the Group on Flickr and/or join the Facebook Page
ALSO
Unrelated to #libday8, I wanted to let people know the Swiss Army Librarian site will join other websites in going dark on Jan 18th to protest SOPA. If you're interested in doing it to0, here's a few tips.
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Posted under Library | No Comments »
