Archives for Reference Question:

Reference Question of the Week – 2/12/12

This reference question happened in our Childrens Room one night, which makes it all the more humorous.

An adult patron went to the Childrens Desk looking for information on the terracotta warriors of China, for a short college paper. The reason she was in the Childrens Room is that the entire sixth grade in my town does an ancient civilizations project, so there is a lot of material up there. However, the terracotta warriors are a popular topic with the kids, and as a consequence of an entire grade working on one project, there wasn't a single book on the shelf that would help this patron.

Which apparently is how this patron's semester was going. She was only taking this particular class because the student loan she was granted required her to take at least two courses - even though she needed just one more to graduate. She took this one thinking it would be an easy elective. However, it had been a lot tougher than she expected, and was actually bringing down her overall GPA - for a course she didn't want or need. So then, when there was nothing in the library to help with her project, her stress level shot up.

But the Childrens Librarian didn't give up, and turned to our databases. While searching Gale's World History in Context, they found an article with this headline:

Topless terra-cotta warriors attract tourists*

She said they laughed so loud that someone from the Circulation Desk came in to see what all the commotion was about.

Contrary to where my mind went, it turns out the topless figures were male, "wearing skirts but topless for performing arts and skills."

After a ten-year excavation and research, archaeologists found that the player figures, quite different from the combat figures discovered before, wore no armors or helmets but gestured for entertaining the royal circle, such as dancing, wrestling and performing acrobatics.

The patron's stress and tension was immediately gone, and although she still had to write the paper, she was now looking forward to it. The Childrens Librarian said the patron couldn't wait to share her findings with the rest of the class.

So, score another one for librarians helping someone in need - and perhaps even saving this patron's GPA.

*"Topless terra-cotta warriors attract tourists to inland." Xinhua News Agency 6 Jan. 2012. Gale World History In Context. Web. 18 Feb. 2012.

The article is also on the free web, in case you don't have the Gale database.

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Reference Question of the Week – 1/22/12

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:

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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Reference Question of the Week – 1/15/12

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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Reference Question of the Week – 1/8/12

I found this question interesting, even though I couldn't help much. An older woman came up to the desk one afternoon and said:

I have message from my granddaughter on my cell phone that I would like to save. How can I record that to a CD so I can listen to it whenever I want?

As you might suspect, I'm decently competent when it comes to tech questions, but I know nothing about cell phones. However, I suspected there must be some web interface she could log into and see all of her account's voicemail as mp3 files or something - at least, I hoped there was. Short of that, there was always the low-tech method of simply holding her phone close to a tape recorder.

Her carrier was AT&T, so I called the local AT&T store and asked them about downloading voicemail files - this is the guy's response:

No, we don't have anything like that - just tell her to hold her phone up to a tape recorder*.

Man. Yeah, I'm sure it'll work, but the quality would probably be pretty bad. So, I tried searching online for recording voicemail from cell phone and after reading a few posts, I found the obvious answer of using the phone's headphone jack to plug into a computer and use that to record.

The Ask MetaFiler post was particularly informative, as it provided multiple options including a list of the different hardware and software options available. Of course, we didn't have any of this in the library, so I couldn't help the woman directly. But it did provide me with enough information to call around to a few local computer repair shops, and ask them if they had the equipment and ability to record her message for her.

Of the shops I called, one said they'd do it for $10 and one said they'd do it for free, and the woman was very happy. She said she's try the free one first, and if it didn't sound good enough, she'd try the other.

It's kind of too bad we didn't have the right cable to do this - now I'm really curious to see if it works (but not enough to actually get my own cell phone).

*The guy at the AT&T store also did say that if the woman was being threatened she should take it to the Police, but that wasn't the case.

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Reference Question of the Week – 1/1/12

As we have come to expect over the last couple years, the first few weeks after the Christmas holidays means a rather dramatic spike in the number of questions about ebooks. The effect this year seemed more profound that usual, which led me to this conclusion:

This year, my library planned a program on using ebooks with library resources for the first Saturday in January. The plan was for me to talk about Overdrive, and give live downloading demos for a Kindle, iPad, and Nook. Also, we invited a sales associate from the local Radio Shack to come talk about the non-library aspects of ereaders - buying ebooks, the differences between the devices themselves, and hopefully answer a few hardware tech support questions.

Our meeting room is big enough, and ereaders are small enough, that I didn't think just holding one up would really help people in the back see which buttons to press. I got the idea of using a camera, pointed at a Kindle or Nook, to project what I was doing to it up on a screen, to make it more visible. I have a little external webcam that I plugged into a computer, and clamped it so it's pointing straight down at a table (where the ereader will sit). Then I found this software called FSCamView which does nothing but take the feed from the webcam and display it full-screen on the laptop. Then, plugging the laptop into a digital projector shows whatever I put in front of the webcam up on the big screen. How could that go wrong?

And since my library is lucky enough to have two digital projectors, I also plan to have a second computer to project the Overdrive catalog. This way, hopefully, people (even in the back) will be able to watch me search the Overdrive, checkout an ebook, download and transfer it to the ereader, and simultaneously see it actually show up on the device.

Here's what the setup looked like 20 minutes before we started:

We presented from the podium in the right corner. Slides (and websites) on the computer were projected onto the wall in the center by our in-the-ceiling projector, and the webcam/projector/ereader setup was on a little table next to the podium, projecting onto the screen on the left side of the photo - you can see an iPad up there now.

It worked well enough for our purposes, and I think people were happy to (sort of) see what we were doing. The problems we had were that the camera wasn't very high resolution, and the lighting was tricky - not to mention glare off the devices.

Even still, the program was a huge success. We had over 100 people in the room (which seats 80), and had to turn people away. On the spot we decided to hold a repeat program in a couple weeks for all the people who couldn't attend this one. I think everyone learned something, and many said that after seeing the steps it takes to download ebooks from Overdrive, they now understand and can do it themselves. Yay for that.

I'm going to keep fiddling with the webcam/projector setup, because there's got to be an easy way to improve that. Then it'll be fun to think of other programs that might benefit from projecting physical objects up on the wall. Hmm.

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Reference Question of the Week – 12/11/11

There isn't actually too much to this week's question, but it kept making me laugh.

The phone rings Friday morning, and an an elderly woman's voice asks,

Patron: Hello, can you help me find a book?
Me: Sure, what's the title?
Patron: There's a party in my pant...

At this point she paused for a second. And now remember, this is coming from an elderly woman - which is conflicting with the usual Anchorman association to that phrase. But then she continues.

Patron: It's a cookbook - oh yes, the title is There's a Party in my Pantry. Do you have it?
Me: [checking the catalog] No, it doesn't look like we do. But let me search online to verify the title.

I search Amazon and find that it's only available as a Kindle book. Just to be extra sure it's not actually a print book too, I search WorldCat, which has no matches.

Me: I'm sorry, it looks like that hasn't been published as a printed book, only as an ebook.
Patron: How can you tell?
Me: Well, I searched for it on Amazon, and it only shows a Kindle version, not a print version.
Patron: [pause] Oh. Can I use that on the Nook too?

That line surprised me a little bit - it shouldn't have, but I was still thrown off by the pants party thing. But anyway, I quickly searched Barnes and Noble's website and found that yes, there is a Nook version. I searched our Overdrive catalog, but unfortunately we didn't have it there.

So I told the patron there was a Nook version available for purchase. We talked a little more about why it was only available as an ebook and not a print book, why it cost only $2.99, and what she would need to do to read it. She seemed satisfied, but did mention she was going to ask her son to buy it for her (which again made me laugh, because I'm immature and the image of this mother-son exchange makes me giggle).

I'm sure it's just the time of year, but this was the first of about ten ebook questions that day - mostly "here's my Kindle, now how do I download to it?"

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