Reference Question of the Week – 6/22/14

In the time my website was down, I kept collecting the odd reference question whenever they came up. Not that it really matters, but some of these questions are from a few weeks ago.

I was sitting next to a coworker at the reference desk when she answered the phone. She listened for a moment, and then covered the phone, turned to me, and asked,

Before I start answering this, was Davy Crockett a real person?

Ha. I said yes, and she said turned back to her computer and looked something up online. She found whatever it was she was looking for, and said into the phone,

Yes, there are descendents of Davy Crockett still alive today.

You're welcome

And then hung up. Apparently, that's all the patron wanted to know.

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Summer Reading Program Ideas

Since I work mostly with adult reference and tech support, I've never done much with summer reading programs. But my library is doing two different things this year that seemed like fun, so I wanted to share.

For patrons, we're doing the Fizz Boom Read program for kids, and an interesting but somewhat complex Literary Elements subject bingo for adults. Which are fine, but it's two other programs we're running that I really think are neat.

First, our Childrens Room is making Fizz Boom Read more fun by adding a little raffle incentive. When kids bring in completed log books, they get a raffle ticket. They can then use their raffle tickets to win one of 24 "prize jars." The jars were put together by library staff, and range from a jar of Legos to beads to pennies to Starburst to race cars to stuffed animals - anything that kids might like and would fit in a jar:

 
 

At the end of the summer, a winning ticket will be pulled for each jar. I know prizes for summer reading are questionable, but I liked this because it's not exactly cutthroat head-to-head competition. Lots of reading is still rewarded with better odds, but the winners are still luck of the draw.

Secondly, our Head of Readers Services put together a "Celebrity Frankenstein" program just for staff. Out of magazine photos, she cut eyes, ears, noses, and mouths of celebrities - and then, for each book a staff person reads, they can build a celebrity Frankenstein face out of the parts:

Bizarre, but engaging - here are all the rules.

She hung a huge sheet up in the Circ office to track everyone's progress, because making it visual makes it much more fun:

And, because this is a staff program, we're also supposed to include notes about what we thought of the book on the back of our face. I think these notes are going to be used later on a "staff picks" display.

I know there are tons of ideas out there for summer reading programs, but I hadn't heard of either of these before. Anything that makes reading more fun is okay in my book.

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Hello (again) World!

Hi everybody. Swiss Army Librarian has been out of commission for a couple a months, but now is almost back to normal. I should be able to start with new posts again next week, but if you're interested in the details of what's happened since The Crash, read on.

In the middle of April, the server that hosts swissarmylibrarian.net crashed. It also turned out that the server had not been performing successful backups since August 2013. We had hoped that some of the August-April data would be recoverable, but it wasn't. Too bad.

My friend Chris, who runs the server, rebuilt with all new hardware, and now has gotten WordPress reinstalled along with all my posts from before August 2013. And happily, he found an alternate source for the posts since the last backup (his RSS reader's archive), but it was text only - no images. I'll work on adding those in as I can find them.

In the meantime, WordPress needs all the recent updates installed, and then I'll be back. I (really) enjoyed my two-month vacation from blogging, but I'm happy to be back too. Thanks to all the well-wishes and offers of support - I truly appreciate it.

And the moral of the story: just having a back-up service isn't enough - you need to make sure it's really backing everything up.

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Reference Question of the Week ¦ 4/6/14

I never know what is going to make me laugh - but quite often, it's when I find out I was wrong about something.

Now, it isn't that I actively stereotype people, but when people ask you questions everyday, sometimes you notice patterns. People who ask to use the Value Line or Morningstar often fit a type. When a guy asks for help finding something to read, and he responds to, "so, what topics are you interested in?" by saying "history," that's not a surprise. Most of the people asking for help finding the biographies are older women. And people looking for the bathroom all look alike.

But I had one question this week that totally took me by surprise. A woman maybe in her late thirties came down the stairs, holding in her arms a baby of about one. She looked like a perfectly normal mom-with-young-child. I would have expected her to ask for books on food, health/diet/exercise, kid issues, home improvement, or relationships. She even walked right past the desk over to the 300s like she'd been there before, so I didn't think much of it.

A minute or so later I walked over there on my way to somewhere else. She was staring up at the call number ranges at the end of the aisles, as if she had a call number for a book she was trying to locate. I asked her if I could help her find anything, and she said,

Yes, do you have MAD Magazine?

Huh - I never in a million years would have pegged her as a MAD Magazine reader, but there you go. Well, there I go, maybe, for trying to guess peoples' interests just based on their appearance.

And our magazines aren't really near where she was (not that she would know that), so I was strictly thinking book topics. But that was great, and I was happy to walk with her back to the YA section to show her our MAD collection. She thanked me and later on I saw her carrying a few upstairs to check out.

After I thought about it, I realized that I don't remember anyone ever asking me for MAD before, so her being the first is great. Plus, I get to laugh at myself for being so far off in my preconceived idea of her interests. Every reader their book!

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Calling in Sick

For the last few weeks, we've had more staff out sick at my library than usual. Infirmaries vary, but this week, whatever is going around really hit us - on Tuesday alone, almost half of the staff was out.

I called in sick Monday and Tuesday, and have been getting by with a lingering cough since then.

Personally, I think a bad enough cough is a good enough reason to call in sick if you work at a public service desk. Even if you feel fine, coughing makes helping someone an unpleasant experience for everyone. (Maybe I'm biased because this means more days at home reading for me, but I don't think I'm off base here).

My library has an informal policy of, "if you're sick, stay home so you don't infect everyone else." Of course we scramble to cover all the desks at times like this, but it's probably better in the long run to have a few people out for a few days than a lot of people out for weeks on end.

I'm sure studies have been done on this very topic, but I'm not feeling well enough right now for that kind of research.

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Reference Question of the Week ¦ 3/30/14

A question this week reminded me of another one of my library pet peeves - which is, when a patron asks for something very specific and slightly esoteric, and you're able to put the exact thing they asked for in their hands, and then they look at you and say, "no, that's not what I'm looking for."

A girl who was in the fifth grade, her mom, and her little brother came up to the desk. The kids then almost immediately wandered away, so the mom asked me to help her find information on Simon Aaron for her daughter's report.

I had never heard of this person, so I asked who it was as I typed in his name to the catalog. The mom said he was a colonial clockmaker, but since she was going off something her daughter had written down, she wasn't complete sure of the details.

Nothing came up for Simon Aaron, so I tried searching for clockmarker information at the same time the mom noticed that "Willard" was written on the paper too. So was that Simon Aaron Willard? Or someone named Simon and another man named Aaron Willard? Neither of us knew.

It turned out to be that Simon Willard was a colonial clockmaker, and Aaron Willard, his brother, was also a clockmaker. They both lived in Massachusetts, but since I'd never been asked by a student about this particular person (the schools do a biography project every year, so we get this type of question repeatedly), I was skeptical that we'd be able to find much about him.

However, the first search result seemed like exactly the right thing: a book titled A history of Simon Willard, inventor and clockmaker. Unfortunately it was in our Local History Room, which meant they couldn't check it out, but of course she could take notes and photocopy important information.

The mom was happy, and she called her daughter over (away from a computer she was using), and I took them to the find the book. Granted, a book from the Local History Room probably doesn't look too exciting to an eleven year old, but if felt like treasure to me. I pulled it off the shelf and handed it to the girl, showing her the title so she could see this was a book all about the person she was researching. She flipped through a few pages and said,

No, that's not what I'm looking for.

Ugh. Too many words, and what she wanted were pictures. This book actually had quite a few illustrations, so I left it with them to look at the pictures it did have while I went back to the desk to keep looking.

I tried variations on his name, colonial craftsman, and clockmakers, and did find one book that had photographs of his clocks, so I got that and came back to the desk.

It was at this time that the brother came up and said YouTube wasn't working, so I fixed that for him.

I went back over to the mom and daughter, who said they couldn't find anything useful in the first book. What the daughter wanted was photographs of his workshop - but the inside of his workshop, not the outside (which were in the book). And so, since they were looking for details of the workshop, the second book I found, which was just about the clocks themselves, was also useless.

The girl went back to the computer to search online, and I went back to the stacks - looking in 973.2 and 681.1, hoping to find a general book on making clocks or colonial life that might have more illustrations of tools. No luck.

So I tried the databases. Biography in Context had a nice article about him, but it was just text. I showed it to the girl, still thinking it might help with her report, but no, she didn't want information about him, just pictures. She had found a book at another library title The craft of the clockmaker, so I helped her request it. She handed me the book from the Local History Room since she didn't need it, and just in case they missed something, I flipped through it slowly, looking at every illustration.

Halfway through the book I found a line drawing of Simon Willard's workbench and vice. That seemed useful, so I showed it to the daughter and mom, and still the girl wasn't impressed. She needed pictures she said. However, after I explained that cameras hadn't been invented yet, she was willing to photocopy the illustration.

That made me feel a little less useless, and also steeled me for implementing My Last Resort: going to the Children's Room.

I again just used the tactic of browsing the shelves for the Dewey numbers 681.1 and 973.2, and found about five promising books about colonial craftsmen. I took them back downstairs and gave them to the girl, explaining they may have useful illustrations of tools and clockmakers. Kids books are much more visually-engaging, and when I left she was flipping through them with interest. I was only a few steps away when I heard her say, "oh, clockmaker!"

About ten minutes later she walked by carrying two of the books, saying she was going to make more photocopies.

This whole interaction took about 30 minutes (on a slow Friday afternoon), and I think they managed to find enough for her project. They came back up to the desk before they left, to bring the books back and to thank me, and they all seemed like they were in a good mood after a productive library visit. At least, I hope so.

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