June 26th, 2010 Brian Herzog
Instead of a reference question this week, here’s a question posed to Unshelved Answers this week:
[What is your] most ironic/moronic question?
A number of librarians have posted almost painful exchanges they’ve had with patrons - mine is:
A patron came in and asked for information on homeschooling her kids. I showed her the section, and ten minutes later I saw her leaving with our copy of Homeschooling for Dummies - come on, should a “dummy” really be teaching kids?
Check it out and post one of your own.
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Posted under Library, Reference Question | No Comments »
June 24th, 2010 Brian Herzog
I passed this church sign while walking around Ottawa:
I’m used to hearing the “Google is not as good as libraries” rhetoric, so it was funny to see another profession facing the same struggle. By the way, Bibles in my library are shelved at 220.5/Bibl - maybe our slogan should be, “find a library, find your way.”
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Posted under Random | 6 Comments »
November 14th, 2009 Brian Herzog
This entertained me, so I thought I’d share - Huffington Post collected some funny responses to questions asked on Yahoo Answers.
I wouldn’t call them the “funniest of all time” - most of them were snarky answers or just really bad questions. But the one about the sandwich did make me laugh out loud.
Occasionally I use Yahoo Answers to help with a patron’s question, but like with any traditional or crowd-sourced resource, it needs to be evaluated critically (and enjoyed).
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November 22nd, 2008 Brian Herzog
I’m going to be visiting my family for the week of Thanksgiving, so this will be my last post until I get back. So instead of a regular reference question today, here’s a tool people can use when they’re asked questions.
It’s not just Google, it’s let me Google that for you. Of course I would never use this with a patron, but it’s “teaching moment” kind of tool, to remind people that Google is good for certain kinds of questions (it’s entertaining, but also borders on snarky).
The way it works is this: visit the website and type in the question you were asked - say, What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? Click the search button, and you get a link to send back to the person who asked you the question, which shows them how they could found the answer themselves.
Just out of curiosity, I thought I’d run a few recent Reference Questions of the Week through it, to see how my answers compared with Google’s:
Google will not replace librarians, because librarians help people in was that Google can’t. And by the way, there is a similar website, but it has a bad word in the URL. Thanks, Chris.
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Posted under Library, Random, Reference Question | 3 Comments »
August 23rd, 2008 Brian Herzog
A few months ago, I listed online services that provide answers to peoples’ questions.
In the library world, the big concern is usually the quality of the answers - do these services provide the same level of quality in the answers that someone would get from a librarian?
As I read on studio twentysix2, perhaps we should be more concerned with the quality of the question.
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Posted under Conferences, Library, Random, Reference Question | No Comments »
