July 19th, 2008 Brian Herzog
I got these two reference questions within an hour of each other - they can be filed under “All Patrons are Local” (or “Yogi Berra sayings“).
First, an older couple walked up to the desk and the husband said:
Patron: We’re just in town from Florida for a funeral, and don’t know our way around. Can you suggest a good pizza place for lunch?
I am a big fan of pizza, so this is a question I can answer with some personal expertise. There are four pizza shops within walking distance of the library, so between the yellow pages and a local map have at the desk for patrons, they were on their way in just a couple minutes.
A little while later, the phone rings:
Different Patron: Hi, I’m one of your local patrons, and am in Florida for vacation. We don’t know our way around and don’t have a map, but we’re looking for this particular pizza place. Can you look it up on the internet and give me directions?
Finding the pizza shop wasn’t hard, and me giving her directions from where they were was a bit tricky, but we worked it out.
Before we hung up, I asked out of curiosity why her solution to this problem was to call her library in Massachusetts. She said it was because she had our phone number in her cell phone, and since we had access to the internet (and Google Maps), she felt my answer would be more reliable and safer than asking for directions from a stranger or at a gas station.
I thought that was nice, and something I hadn’t though of before. Maybe libraries should encourage patrons to add us to their cell phone contact list, to make it easier for them to call us when they need to know something. Or maybe we should all install pizza ovens.
See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Service | No Comments »
July 12th, 2008 Brian Herzog
This question wasn’t particularly hard, but the phrasing of the question took me by surprise, and the patron was funny, too. The phone rings:
Me: Reference desk, can I help you?
Patron: Do you personally take the Boston Globe?
I think it was the word “take” that threw me off. I wondered if he was asking if I took a copy of the Globe from somewhere and brought it to the Library, or if I took our copy and kept it at the reference desk.
I stuttered a bit, and then explained that yes, the Library has a subscription to the Globe. He was not impressed.
Patron: I’m sure it does, but that’s not what I’m asking. I want to know if you personally take a subscription. I need to talk to someone who knows the paper. In the daily paper, there’s a section called Sidekick, which has the comics and horoscope and things. Mind you, I don’t believe in that stuff. I’ve been reading it for three months now, kind of like the comics, you see. I figured I’d read it on my birthday, too, which was Sunday. This past Sunday’s Globe didn’t have a Sidekick section, so I want to know from someone who reads the paper where the horoscope is. I looked all through it and couldn’t find it. Mind you, I don’t believe in that stuff.
Mind you, this is the condensed version of his question.
Anyway, I told him that no, I didn’t read the paper, but I’ll ask around the staff to find someone who did, and I’ll look through our copy of the Sunday Globe to see if I could find the horoscopes. He was skeptical, but gave me his name and number so I could call him back.
We were short-staffed, and no one working read the Sunday Globe. Instead of spending a half hour looking through the paper, I called the Boston Globe Customer Service and explained the situation. The sales rep was very nice, and said that they had been getting calls all week about this. Apparently, for the first time in 50 years, the Globe’s production department forgot to include the Sidekick section in the Sunday paper.
He offered me a week’s credit, but could not send that section of last Sunday’s paper to me. Since the patron was looking for that specific day, that didn’t help, so I asked if he knew were the information came from and if I could find it somewhere else. This brightened him up, as he told me that the horoscope for the day was on their website.
After a bit of clicking around the Boston Globe website, I found their horoscope section and worked back from the current day to find and print the horoscope for July 6th. I called the patron, who was entertained by the rare omission, happy that I’d found it, and he said he’d be in the next day to pick it up.
It did make him nervous, though - he’d been reading horoscopes for months, and the first time there’s a problem with it is on his birthday. That’s got to be a bad sign.
See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question | No Comments »
July 5th, 2008 Brian Herzog
I really like answering reference questions using print resources. But I also get just as much satisfaction answering a question using a tool I read about on someone’s blog.
In honor of the Fourth of July this year, a patron was doing off-beat research into things that have happened on July 4ths past, to develop a trivia game for his cookout.
I knew of plenty of “in this day in history” type resources, but he had already found a lot of that kind of information. Happily, I remembered reading a library’s blog post mentioning a website listing #1 songs for a given day in history.
With just two clicks, we had a list of the Billboard #1 song for July 4th for the past 100+ years. The patron was very happy with this, and proceeded to our CD collection to get as many July 4th #1 songs as he could to use as music for his party. It’s rare to see a patron walk away giddy, but this was one of those times.
This website will also be handy with a annual cub scout project. To earn one of their merit badges, the scouts have to find out what happened on the day they were born. Not that knowing the #1 song will make them better scouts, but it does add a fun new dimension to the project.
Also, I would like to point out that in my birth year of 1974, the #1 song was “Rock the Boat” by The Hues Corporation. That’s a good song title for a holiday celebrating revolution and independence (even if that’s not what the song’s about).
Tags: #1, billboard, birthday, history, libraries, Library, music, number 1, number one, on this day, public, Reference Question, song See Also
Posted under Conferences, Library, Personal, Random, Reference Question, Resources | 1 Comment »
June 28th, 2008 Brian Herzog
This isn’t a reference question, but instead is a list of a few other places where reference questions (and answers) are being archived:
Help Build a Library Q&A Custom Search
A post on the Library 2.0 Ning group mentioned a project to create a Google custom search engine of just reference questions from libraries. If your library does this, be sure to add it to the list - the more data it can search, the more useful it will be.
“The Oracle Collective”
An article in this week’s New York Times Magazine talks about asking questions on the internet, and a few services that provide answers (Yahoo Answers, Ask.com, etc). It’s an interesting article, and the recommendations at the end are worth reading. Via LISNews.
I Get By With A Little Help From MeFi
No roundup of ask-a-question resources is complete with mentioning Ask MetaFilter. MetaFilter, a.k.a. MeFi, is a community blog to which interesting websites are posted (essentially “filtering” the internet for the rest of us). In Ask MeFi, volunteers from the community provide answers to questions asked by site visitors.
Internet Public Library Reference Desk
Staffed by librarians and library students, the Internet Public Library is always a reliable source for answers. Their list of frequently asked questions isn’t as fancy as some, but it still gets the job done. (And in the interest full disclosure, I volunteered with the IPL when I was in library school.)
Surely There Is A Wiki…
Very similar to Yahoo Answers and Ask MeFi in principle is WikiAnswers. As a wiki, anyone can ask or answer a questions, and also edit existing answers. The format of a single answer can be easier that reading lots of individual replies from different people, but here you can also view the discussion of the answer. Part of Answers.com.
I know lots of individual libraries are doing this too, and some are twittering their reference questions. If you know of other good sources to ask questions online and search through answers, please share.
See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question | 3 Comments »
June 21st, 2008 Brian Herzog
This is a reference question I’ve been holding onto for awhile, hoping I’d have an answer to share. I don’t, so now I’m hoping someone else might.
A patron came to the desk asking for help with YouTube. He’s one of our regulars, and has a bit of a compulsive personality. He’s also a big fan of The Doors: he’s working on a book, buys whatever merchandise he can from eBay, and watches any related video on YouTube - or rather, tries to.
One day, he came to the desk and said:
When I search for “the doors” on YouTube, there are over 79,000 videos. However, It only shows the first 50 pages of search results, which is only the first 500 videos. How can I watch the rest?
I had never clicked this far into any search returns in my life. So I tried it out, and sure enough, he was right. I played a bit, but couldn’t find any way to get past this barrier to the rest of the videos.
I searched their Help Center with no success, and so sent in the question via their Contact Form. I also searched the general internet, but couldn’t find anything relating to this issue.
This was on April 25th, 2008. So far, I haven’t heard anything back from YouTube or Google. I resubmitted the question a couple weeks later, but again, no response.
I’ve played with this search limit again recently, and it looks like now YouTube cuts off the returned videos in the 540’s, which is on page 28. The pagination shows out to page 31, and implies there is more, but when you click beyond page 28 the pagination and video numbering starts over at 1.
I can understand the technical limitations and the necessity of an upper cap on returned search matches. But with no explanation or message that there is a limit, and this confusing/resetting pagination, this patron feels YouTube is teasing him personally, and cheating him out of these other 78,500+ videos.
Does anyone have an answer I can pass on to the patron? Thanks.
Tags: bug, libraries, Library, limit, limits, public, Reference Question, results, search, searching, videos, youtube See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Technology | 6 Comments »
