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Librarians: The Google Before Google
An anonymous reader writes NPR has an article about the questions people ask librarians. Before the internet, the librarian was your best bet for a quick answer to anything on your mind. "We were Google before Google existed," NYPL spokesperson Angela Montefinise explains. "If you wanted to know if a poisonous snake dies if it bites itself, you'd call or visit us." The New York Public Library in Manhattan recently discovered a box of old reference questions asked by patrons and plans to release some in its Instagram account. Here are a few of the best:
- I just saw a mouse in the kitchen. Is DDT OK to use? (1946)
- What does it mean when you dream of being chased by an elephant? (1947)
- Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it? Answer: We couldn't tell you that answer quickly. Why don't you try the Post Office? Response: This is the Post Office. (1963)
- Where can I rent a beagle for hunting? (1963)
It doesn't need to be. It's still a history lesson. Not many young people would know that in the past you'd actually call a library to ask them questions. Heck, I'm 30 and I would have never considered calling them!
Library Science was and is a true profession with a true college degree.
So is Hotel Management, now sometimes known as Hospitality and Hotel Management.
Kriston
What does it mean when you dream of being chased by an elephant?
That you're Hillary Clinton running for President in 2016.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
> Can you tell me the thickness of a U.S. Postage stamp with the glue on it?
A: Get a pile of stamp sheets, measure the height, and do a calculation. (You did go to school, didn't you.)
A history lesson for you young-uns.
Back before the internet, guys like this were generally only found in the back room of libraries, sorting incoming books and handling interlibrary loans - safely sequestered from the rest of society.
(My college job was at our university library, way back in the 1980s... no, at the front desk!)
Before public Internet access it also cost 10 a minute for a long distance phone call, but one could call into the modems at the Library to access the Internet (being an educational institute). Being safely sequestered from the rest of society (at home) I used to call into the Library modems then log into another Library at a different city/state, calling out from there to the BBS's found in that area; cost nothing for me or the Library.
(My college job was at our university library, way back in the 1980s... no, at the front desk!)
Yep my College job was being the "computer tutor" for a small room with maybe 10 computers, slack times I'd man the front desk which is a bit of fun.
Some older lady saved a blank *.Doc over her mid term assignment due that day, I told her it was gone and just work fast. Thinking about it Word kept a lot of backups, I ran undelete on her floppy and retrieved her assignment, I was her best friend for a few weeks :}
I'm over 40 and while in junior HS my friends and I who couldn't yet drive and didn't have convenient public transit to the library would make a friendly game of calling the librarian on duty in our town's library. We might, once a week, when it would have been slow, think of an aspect of a topic about which we were arguing or a subject we were attempting to understand, and IFF it would require a smart person who knew how to research fewer than five minutes we'd call. Part of the fun was having a public servant almost magically come back with an answer.
They were mostly smart and skilled at what they did. It was even more fun when they said in a surprised tone, "that's a really good question. I'll try to find out." Of course, sometimes they would come back with some information about the reference material and say it wasn't clear that the authors agreed on an answer. Sometimes they couldn't find anything. As often as not they had pretty useful information.
Poisonous snakes poison you when you eat them. Venomous snakes poison you when they bite you.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
"How do I hide a dead body?"
Prop it up at a desk in Congress; no one will ever notice...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Of course nowadays the question one-level-up from that might be "Where can I get a Sears & Roebuck catalog?" to which the answer is amazon.com, funny enough.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
To be fair, you could also say that it's an insult to Librarians to claim Google is equivalent. I don't call doctor's the "The webmd before webmd" after all because there can be additional value in receiving an answer from someone knowledgeable over receiving data.
public libraries (and the real books they contain) are still awesome, and very much under appreciated by most of the government entities that fund them. visit your library, get a library card, and use it. libraries are the cornerstone of many neighborhoods and smaller communities around the country, and the world, and they still serve a valuable and irreplaceable purpose.
But then the question just becomes "where can I buy a vernier caliper?". It's not like they had amazon.com either, and I doubt it was in the Sears & Roebuck catalog.
It was in the Sears & Roebuck catalog. The fashion today is to underestimate just how great S&R was back in the day, because Sears is so godawful terrible today, but you really could get pretty much anything from S&R. You could get a doorknob, for example, and a house to go with it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We asked very different things of librarians and Google.
Me to librarian (in the early 1980's): Where can I find a good book on sharks?
me to Google: +tentacle porn midget chocolate sauce -"val kilmer"