Stephen Akey writes for the Hedgehog Review about life at the telephone reference desk back in the day:
How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine? Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources. Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me.
From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing. […]
Actually, we didn’t know all that stuff; we just knew how to find it. I myself rarely remembered any of the facts I divulged to our callers, but I remembered the reference sources where I found the facts. Personal knowledge was inadmissible. I could reel off by heart the names of the four Dead Boys (Cheetah Chrome, Stiv Bators, Jimmy Zero, and Johnny Blitz—but didn’t everyone know that?), but unless I could track them down and—rule number one—cite the source (in this case, probably the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll), I had no information to impart and no answer to give to anyone who might need that information for whatever reason. But we almost always found the right source. […]
Did Charon row or pole the souls of the dead across the River Styx? Can you give me the names and addresses of manufacturers of prosthetic devices in Massachusetts? Where are the manuscripts of the composer Marc Blitzstein to be found? (The person asking that question, much to the excitement of my balletomane boss Milo, identified herself as a certain Agnes de Mille.) What was the first language ever spoken? (“Anywhere? At any time?” I asked the caller. “Yes,” she replied, before I suggested that we might try to reformulate the question.) On and on it went. Of course, what we were doing, millions of others were doing on their own without the intercession of any librarian. All of us were negotiating an informational world without algorithmic search engines. Although I hang on to some battered dictionaries and reference books, I resort to Google as readily as anyone else. Undoubtedly, much more has been gained than lost in the transformation of laborious research into something immediate, accessible, and available to everyone. Still, a world that has tossed out the scholarly, comprehensive, and authoritative print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of the colorless, death-by-a-thousand-edits mediocrity of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.
Even without my nostalgia for certain antiquated and specialized reference books (Kane’s Famous First Facts, the Encyclopedia of Associations, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable), I do think certain advantages accrued to analog ways of gathering information. The many hundreds of reference sources that we were trained to use in Telephone Reference had their biases, their blind spots, their inaccuracies. In the apprenticeship each of us endured under Milo’s exhausting tutelage before getting anywhere near a telephone, we learned not merely how to find information but how to think about finding information. Don’t take anything for granted; don’t trust your memory; look for the context; put two and three and four sources together, if necessary. Sometimes it was difficult to communicate such variables to our callers, who just wanted a quick answer rather than a disquisition on the mistaken assumption that the transmission of information was a straightforward matter. […]
“Think like a librarian,” Milo used to urge us, which might sound less impressive than “Think like a philosopher,” “Think like a psychologist,” or even “Think like a lawyer,” but it did make the point that information wasn’t given, that it had to be actively sought. Once, a student called asking for book titles that might help her with her assigned topic on the pros and cons of marriage. The Library of Congress subject heading “marriage” was too broad to be of much use, and the subheadings in various library catalogs weren’t much better. But remembering James Thurber and E.B. White’s Is Sex Necessary?, I reasoned that there might well be a book on the pros and cons of marriage with an analogous title. Sure enough, Is Marriage Necessary? did turn up as a title in our catalog, and I was able to start the student on her way to a bibliography—nothing special, but our work was full of wonderful, nothing-special moments. […]
A certain esprit de corps facilitated the work and even diffused tensions in that pressure cooker of an office. I knew a lot about rock-and-roll and spoke Spanish. Aaron had a law degree and took all the questions about legal research that stumped us. (He also dispensed free legal advice on occasion, until Milo put a stop to it.) Milo knew theater; Paul was francophone; Kathleen knew movies and pop culture. (Our preferences skewed arty left-of-center, which was inevitable in our milieu.) Sometimes we worked backward, pooling what we already knew to find the reference sources that would confirm (and occasionally contradict) the foregone conclusion. Another rule: Don’t hide your ignorance. There was no Google to cover up the gaps in our knowledge. Sally Jessy Raphael might have been the prime minister of New Zealand or she might have been an exceedingly unctuous talk show host. Unless I asked who she was (the latter, not the former), I wouldn’t know the best sources to check to find her place of birth. As expected, the caller who asked about Ms. Raphael spent a certain amount of time insulting me for my ignorance, but she got her answer.
Many of our callers were historical novelists. Some of them identified themselves as such, but it was usually obvious even when they didn’t. They tended to ask questions like “What time was low tide in Boston Harbor on May 14, 1932?” […]
It all makes me intensely nostalgic, even though of course I realize we’re better off with instant access to all that information on our own. (An odd bit of synchronicity: just before I read Akey’s essay, I had come across the name Agnes de Mille as a punchline at the end of this edition of the NY Times’ Metropolitan Diary [archived]. I hadn’t thought about her in years.)
It all makes me intensely nostalgic
Never fear: their time will come again, once “AI”-spawned “original content” has reduced the entire internet to a wasteland of “hallucinations.”
(Google search is also leading the way in the grand project of information destruction online: first result for “transubstantiation” is “Shop transubstantiation | Low priced transubstantiation”, linking to something mysteriously called “Amazon.” The fire and brimstone will surely be obliterating Mountain View and Bellevue very soon now.)
All right, then: If Google Was a Guy.
Back in the day, I was one of those people who now reach for their phone at every opportunity to check on mimnutiae, except then I would take a note, and check on the accumulated notes at my following visit to the University Library. A good skill to have, though I don’t need it as often.
“I could reel off by heart the names of the four Dead Boys”?!?! Homer nods, or something. As every schoolboy used to know, there were FIVE Dead Boys. The one the author inexcusably omits was Jeff Magnum (not to be confused with Jeff Mangum, who came to prominence playing in a somewhat different style in a later decade).
EDITED TO ADD: I should perhaps disclose that I did use wikipedia to confirm the accuracy of my memory of the name of the omitted Dead Boy before posting …
Hey, I’ve been looking for some low priced transubstantiation!
in case any of my fellow new yorkers were wondering: for us, the most useful answer to agnes de mille’s question is: they’ve got a microfilm copy at brooklyn college.
@Y: in my family, growing up, it was rare for us to get through dinner without someone having to grab the (one-volume Columbia) encyclopedia, the (Rand McNally) atlas, or the (2-volume, with magnifying glass) OED. but then, i was raised by highly literate wolves.
It’s probably needless to say that I have all of those reference works close at hand.
Although I got my 2-volume OED used, without the magnifying glass. Fortunately, I am near-sighted.
Back before there was a map of the world handy from everywhere, a few lucky libraries had a complete set of the USSR military maps. So if you read someplace about a village in Croatia or Nepal that wasn’t shown in the usual atlases, a pleasant hour pulling giant folders of maps out of their drawers and searching through them would do it.
Once upon a time… long, long ago…
I was a corporate strategy consultant at a firm HQed (how does one spell that?) at Fifty-first and Fifth Ave. in New York City. On the lowest floor of our offices was a reference library.
“[…] specialized reference books (Kane’s Famous First Facts, the Encyclopedia of Associations“
Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! The Encyclopedia of Associations! First stop for an Associate Consultant about to start an assignment to identify acquisition targets for a European client in the non-ferrous metals semi-manufacturing trade, or target markets for engineering plastics not including military aircraft windshields. Yeah, I could tell you stories about shooting frozen chickens at those to prove durability on takeoff collisions with seagulls. but… I digress.
We had a cozy relationship with a nameless German financial behemoth, “Deu…nk”, that tossed us lots of acquisition projects for their clientele. We provided industry overviews and lists of acquisition targets. They financed the deals. A lucrative time was had by all, except the associates who worked eighty hour weeks.
So down I’d go on our interior staircase to grab the large, heavy, Encyclopedia of Associations.
Flipping through its flimsy pages was like open stack browsing in one handy volume. My weary eyes alit on the “Grooving and Grinding Association”. I shit you not, as we used to say back in the day of yellow neckties and such pitiful jargon as, “give the numbers a haircut”.
Nope. Nothing to do with Studio Fifty-four in its trendy nightclub iteration.
Ever watch the huge machines ingest potholed asphalt roadway? Before the new layer is applied, other enormous mechanical creatures gouge lines into the remaining layer. Seems the folks who perform that public service, grinding channels and grooves into roadways have a trade group of their very own.
No, not as impressive as frozen birds hitting a sheet of Noryl® or Lexan, and, incidentally exploding and landing all over the brass laden uniforms of a room full of generals and admirals.
Though I have no library degree, I worked many years in two libraries, and helping people find stuff leaves good memories.
We had a research library at our company until we moved offices in 2012. Since then, it’s the internet and an internal data base of studies and papers, and a research service that uses the same resources (plus has access to commercial data bases subscriptions to which would be too expensive to give to all employees).
When they dissolved the library, they allowed everyone to take what they wanted; I snagged some nice technical dictionaries (which I basically don’t use, because it’s all on the net, proving the point of dissolving the library).
I grew up mostly in the internet age but we had paper atlases at hand for family dinners 🙂 Wish I could remember the specific titles, I think there were three or four main ones across the years.
I came across this collection of Weird and funny questions submitted to the New York Public Library pre-internet. on tumblr a few weeks ago. This article is great b/c it gives more context/personal experience behind those old cards!
From the “Personals” column of the San Francisco Chronicle, 12/15/1993:
(After spending countless hours researching ovine aquatic capabilities, Personals was struck by a blinding revelation: The caller probably wanted to know, “How long does it take a ship to sink?”)
Besides reminding me of the stupid old joke about the Italian complaining in a hotel that “there is sheet on my bed”, this made me ask – how did the answers get back to the callers? Did they leave a number under which they could be called back, or were they required to check back from time to time to see if an answer had be found?
I am genuinely disappointed to discover that the Encyclopedia of Associations is not some kind of thesaurus of connected ideas.
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.”
That quotation from Samuel Johnson (from Boswell’s Life) has an oddly anachronistic feel, as if Johnson is talking about popping into the local public library and scanning the summaries and blurbs printed on the back of the books, but of course by “back” he means “spine” and by “library” he means either someone’s personal collection of books or that of some private institution like a club.
I retired as a university librarian ten years ago, and I have to say my main regret is not so much the passing of the reference books as the need to employ people qualified to use them. Most public libraries in the UK these days are badly underfunded and staffed by volunteers. Too many university libraries have become simply warm places for students to work, with some decorative bookshelves to add character.
Besides reminding me of the stupid old joke about the Italian complaining in a hotel that “there is sheet on my bed”,
Just for reference, the actual joke is “i wanna sheet on the bed!” (Fork on the table, piece on my plate) etc.
Still, a world that has tossed out the scholarly, comprehensive, and authoritative print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of the colorless, death-by-a-thousand-edits mediocrity of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.
I have to say, this seems like a rather tendentious claim. With no further detail there’s no way to quantify it, but color me doubtful that, on the whole, Wikipedia is actually meaningfully worse than physical references.
I learned about people calling the public library to get answers to questions from The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, in which the main character, Anthony Monday, works at a 1950s branch library helping out the reference librarian with her various tasks. (John Bellairs’ novels for children always featured a pre-teen protagonist who becomes close friends with one or more middle-aged eccentrics. Usually, they fight against evil magic, but that particular book is the exception, and when he added magic to the second book in the series, they had already become tiresomely formulaic.)
The particular questions listed included one (the most prominently featured in the narrative, although that just meant it got an extra sentence or two) was about someone who called in asking for the closest state in which someone could get married without a blood test. The librarian won’t give him an answer, presumably because she thought he had syphilis, but I thought that was extremely unfair to people who, like myself, really just hate needles. (When I was married in 2001, I think Massachusetts was the only state that still required a blood test, and even the Bay State did away with that soon afterwards.)
I have to say, this seems like a rather tendentious claim.
Well, tendentious for sure, but I wouldn’t call it a claim so much as a wistful expression of nostalgia (part of the “everything was better when I was young” phenomenon). No need to take it seriously.
“how did the answers get back to the callers? Did they leave a number under which they could be called back, or were they required to check back from time to time to see if an answer had be found?”
I was wondering that too. My money would be on the “leave a number” option, but I’d like to know for sure. Maybe I should call a reference librarian and ask?
Hah, I was thinking about Bellairs just yesterday. Namely wondering what percentage of people who decide to pick up a novel by Tobias Smollett — a largely forgotten writer — were first introduced to the name as children by the frequent mentions in Bellairs.
Huh, and Agnes de Mille just came up yesterday in response to a joke about the square dancing-tap crossover in the movie of Oklahoma! (why didn’t it catch on as a trend?). She is in the wind, somehow.
I am modestly interested (assuming it’s true) in the backstory to this piece’s implicit claim that the Brooklyn Public Library rather than the NYPL mothership in Manhattan was the better telephonic go-to for magazine factcheckers and historical-novel writers etc etc. (The “New York” public library system covers the Bronx and Staten Island as well as Manhattan, but the Brooklyn and Queens systems are each independent/autonomous. Because pre-1898 historical reasons, I assume.)
I have nothing against a Brooklyn-based institution outperforming a Manhattan-based one in some sphere of human endeavor but especially in the later 20th century there seemed to be some gravitational tendencies discouraging that sort of thing, so huzzah if this cut against that trend.
Separately re Bellairs, I read a fair amount of his stuff when I was circa 11 or 12 or 13 but had clean forgotten it by the time I was 17 or 18 and first read Pound’s poetic account of the more hapless Bellaires https://allpoetry.com/The-Bellaires, and it was some decades later before I actually noticed the near-coincidence of surname.
the colorless, death-by-a-thousand-edits mediocrity of Wikipedia
I thought this was a rather apt expression.
Although there are plenty of articles that are too colorful by far and need those thousand edits.
Some articles could be deleted entirely. One death is worth a thousand edits.
[Towards a Festschrift for David Eddyshaw]
APEs get MAD (Model Autophagy Disorder).