Early in my library career I worked at Hennepin County Library in Minnesota, the library system that served the suburbs around Minneapolis (long before the city and county libraries merged). My first job at HCL was at the headquarters location, where I was expected to find answers to questions that couldn’t be answered out in the branch libraries. We received the questions on slips of paper and went off to find the answers to such questions as, “How do I make a smoke cooker out of an old barrel?” or “How can I disguise the taste of bacon fat in the cookies I bake?”, or my favorite, “How do they raise the dead in the Voodoo?” This was long before the Internet; we took all the questions seriously and did our best to find answers. I used printed magazine and journal indexes, browsed the book collection and the pamphlet file, used my intuition about where to find answers, and only rarely sent off answers of “can’t find anything.” It was a great education in reference work; I became fluent in the Dewey Decimal system and subject heading searches. When I later went back to working at the reference desk, facing the real people with their questions, I had good preparation for whatever came my way.
There were occasionally questions from readers trying to find a book or story they had once read, or heard about but didn’t have complete information, i.e., author or title. Sometimes the titles were garbled. Sometimes you would recognize the book or story from your own reading, or you would know a subject specialist to ask. It was like a treasure hunt and finding the answer was very rewarding. So this article, from the website Atlas Obscura, about the New York Public Library staff who work on such questions was a treat for me to read. Maybe you’ll enjoy it too. Click here.
A Reader's Place 