January 23rd, 2010 Brian Herzog
I thought this question was interesting for three reasons:
- The question is unusual
- I hardly played a role at all in answering it
- Despite #2, the patron got an excellent answer
Here’s what happened: an email came to the reference desk from someone in the Netherlands, who is writing a book on the Allied pilots who took part in the air war over his country during WWII. In his book, he wants to focus on the lives of the men as people, instead of them as soldiers, and so is trying to track down things like what they did before the war, who their wives/girlfriends were, what growing up was like for them, etc.
Through his research in identifying and tracing the crews of planes shot down in his area, he found that one of the men was a Chelmsford resident. He sent me the man’s name and date of death, and asked us to find out whatever we could about his life before the war.
This sounded like an impossible question, especially since we don’t have the staff to research something like this. However, I forwarded it to the local genealogy club (with the patron’s permission), as they often have volunteers who are willing to work on projects like this.
Within a day, a genealogy club volunteer located an obituary for a descendant of the Chelmsford WWII flier (which mentioned the deceased WWII flier by name), and the obituary also listed the names of living relatives. The volunteer looked up the relatives in the phone book, contacted them, explained about the book the man from the Netherlands was working on, and gave them his contact information. They said they’d be delighted to provide information for him, and would contact him as soon as they organized some photos and other information.
How great is that? I hope the author has this much success in locating information on the other airmen in his book, and I’m happy that there are other organizations in town I can rely on to pick up where the library leaves off.
This is another example of the reference librarian’s motto: “you don’t have to know the answer to every question, you just have to know where to find the answers.”
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Posted under Library, Reference Question | 1 Comment »
November 19th, 2009 Brian Herzog
Sometimes, being a librarian equates to being a packrat. At least in the virtual world, I can collect as many links as I want and it doesn’t take up any room. However, to be useful, it does take organization.
For awhile now I’ve been bookmarking posts about free resources for clipart, photographs and other artwork. I use them for library publications, and also for my posts here. But just this week I got my act together and started transferring those links from my Bloglines account to my Delicious account, and thought I’d share them.
If you’re curious how to do this with Delicious, check out my how-two post for creating library subject guides.
And just for good measure, here are a few web design tools I had bookmarked, too:
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Posted under Library, Resources, Technology, Websites | 3 Comments »
September 1st, 2009 Brian Herzog
I’ve been working on an answer to Debbie’s comment about a guide to ready reference, but am sorry to say I haven’t been able to find one.
Searches on the web found a lot of great ready reference lists of websites, but not print books. Amazon lists some, but I don’t have them to review. I remember having such lists in my library school text books, so maybe that’s the best place to look.
But as I thought about this, and looked at what’s on the ready reference shelf at my library, I concluded two things:
- To be effective, the ready reference collection needs to be tailored to the library and its patrons. My current ready reference collection is very different from the one we had behind the desk of the Kent State University Library when I worked there, but they are equally appropriate
- The best thing to do might just be to ask other librarians which print ready reference resources they like and use
So in the spirit of the second one, here’s an overview of resources on the ready reference shelf in my library. If you’re so inclined, please share what you’ve got on your shelf - I’d really be curious to know.
For staff to help answer computer questions:
Things that don’t really get used but I feel we should have:
Quick Facts & Referencey books (for annual resources, we keep the current year in ready reference and move past years to the reference collection):
Government Information:
Business Directories:
Local Information:
Shelved right next to the desk
Granted, many of these only get used once or twice a year, if that, and almost all have online versions (or equivalents). But I really like being able to answer a question just by grabbing a book within reach, showing a patron how to look it up, and then let them sit at a table absorbing the information. I don’t know, it feels more tangible and satisfying than relying on Google for everything.
Tags: collection, libraries, Library, print, public, ready, ready referemce, readyref, ref, reference, Resources See Also
Posted under Books, Library, Resources | 3 Comments »
November 6th, 2008 Brian Herzog
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of announcements concerning video content being added to online resources. Both InfoTrac and NewsBank have recently made email announcements about content they’ve each added to their databases.
InfoTrac added many full-text resources to the General and Academic OneFiles, some of which include video segments. NewsBank’s announcement was more thorough - here’s an excerpt from the email:
In response to the rising demand in libraries, NewsBank is adding video news content to our online news resources-at no additional charge to our customers. The complete package from respected media distributor Voxant includes the following sources: The Associated Press, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, local affiliates of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, as well as coverage from Canadian Broadcasting, Agence France Press and more. Your institution will have access to video clips from all or a select group of these sources, depending on your subscription.
Beginning on Monday, October 20, the videos clips will be added to NewsBank resources. Users will be able to:
- Play news videos within the NewsBank interface, in the same space used to display text articles
- Select specific videos from a comprehensive results lists that also includes NewsBank articles, or restrict their search to “video only”
- Access recent and archived news videos at your institution or remotely
- Email links of specific videos to friends, or embed them in a presentation
I find it curious that they say this is in response to demand from libraries. From the few tests I did, most of this newly added video content is already available free online, so I’m not sure where this demand was coming from (or why the vendors choose to listen to this particular demand instead of other things libraries have been demanding).
If a patron wants to watch a news show online, I can’t see myself showing them how to navigate the library website to find the right database, log in with their library card, navigate the database for the right title, and then find the episode. It is just easier for me and the patron to use the station’s own website or YouTube as a resource.
And speaking of YouTube, Library Stuff linked to a YouTube announcement on c|net today: “YouTube will begin offering feature films produced by at least one of the biggest Hollywood movie studios possibly as early as next month.” Combine that with Hulu.com and other websites, and that’s a lot of available video content.
For the database vendors though, I would prefer they concentrating on making their resources more user-friendly and useful by “uniquing” them, instead of providing content that is already available from other sources.
Tags: content, database, databases, infotrac, libraries, Library, news, newsbank, online, public, Resources, too much joy, video, youtube See Also
Posted under Library, Technology | No Comments »
August 16th, 2008 Brian Herzog
One difficult question I get occasionally is “do you have rankings for doctor/lawyers?”
I think what people are expecting is a Consumer Reports-like ranking of these two professions, but unfortunately, we don’t have anything exactly like that. We do have some resources for doctors, but lawyers are different.
A patron asked me to help her find lawyer rankings this past week. I did find a few websites showing some rankings, but I had no idea how reliable any of them were, and none of them got down to the local level needed by a patron in a small public library. Another thing I found were lots of articles talking about lawyers suing websites about their rankings, so that might explain the scarcity of resources.
In the end, two resources appeared promising, but only one ended up helping:
- The American Bar Association has a Lawyer Locater, which is powered by martindale.com and LexisNexis. It does provide some information on a lawyer’s background, including the Martindale-Hubbell peer review rating from their Law Directory. The amount of information varies by lawyer, but in this case, the lawyer my patron was looking for wasn’t listed at all
- The Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers provides an attorney status report which, while it doesn’t rate lawyers, does indicate when the lawyer was admitted to the bar and if they’ve had any complaints against them (my patron was shocked to find out her lawyer was admitted to the bar just eight months ago)
- A third resource the patron left with was the phone number of the Massachusetts Bar Association’s Dial-A-Lawyer referral program, which assists private citizens in choosing legal council
Finding resources to research local doctors is slightly easier. This might be because the medical profession is more closely watched than the legal profession, or that people are more willing/able to travel for medical procedures than law suits.
One book I often turn to in our reference collection is America’s Top Doctors, which lists doctors by region, specialty, hospital, and by name.
Another nice local resource is the Boston Consumers’ Checkbook (which is also available for other cities). This magazine is similar to Consumer Reports, but instead of rating products, it rates services, including many medical services.
Part of the Mass.gov website reports on Health Care Quality and Cost Information. It includes lots of information for patients, but what I usually steer people towards are the “Volume by Surgeon and Hospital” reports - these aren’t rankings exactly, but instead show how often a doctor or hospital performs a certain procedure. Other reports also list cost and mortality rates for doctors and hospitals.
Another state-level website is the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine’s On-Line Physician Profile Site. Each profile includes general biographical information supplied by the doctor, and also has sections showing any malpractice payments made or any disciplinary and/or criminal actions taken against the doctor.
Additional web resources are:
- The American Medical Association’s doctor finder doesn’t provide rankings, but it does show contact and biographical information for both AMA members and non-members (it gives priority to members, it does list non-members if you click the right buttons)
- DrScore.com lets people score their own doctors and report on their experiences. Although the ratings are voluntary and anonymous, I did notice they indicate “Castle Connolly Top Doctors,” which is the America’s Top Doctor’s resource I mentioned above. And in addition to the ratings, this website is also useful as doctor finder
- RateMDs.com seems more commercial than DrScore.com, but it also seems to have more ratings and comments. This also has nice feature search for finding local doctors
I list these because they are free and useful, and accessible for my patrons. I’m sure there are many more not-free websites out there too, as well as additional good print resources. I’d appreciate hearing suggestions for more resources in the comments below - thanks.
Tags: doctor, doctors, hospital, lawyer, lawyers, legal, libraries, Library, medical, public, ranking, rankings, rating, ratings, Reference Question, Resources, sources, Websites See Also
Posted under Library, Reference Question, Resources | 2 Comments »
