I seem to be in the habit of thanking institutions now. I must have the Thanksgiving spirit. Today, the Yale Avalon Project saved me while I was at the reference desk. I tend to fear questions dealing with either statistics or government documents. Especially documents that were published before our lovely age of online catalogs. I get these questions just seldom enough that I always feel a little bit rusty when I’m tackling them.
I’m not totally incompetent (I hope!) but I am aware of my own limitations when it comes to doing things like tracking down government documents from the 1930s and 1940s. So I had a girl at the reference desk needing historical documents dealing with Palestine. And I showed her a couple things she could use to track down some of the documents (print sources and whatnot), suggested some people she could contact if she wanted a more extensive orientation to what we have locally, but like many undergraduates her project was due in a couple days and then I was like waitaminute! No way can something like this not be online somewhere in some fashion. And some things were, she was thrilled, and we then started checking to see if we had some of the print sources used for the project, and we did!
So it is sort of a backwards way of doing reference work, using google to get citations for print sources, but it sort of worked. Yay Yale!
11:27 am on November 21st, 2003 1
This Palestine archive at the Avalon Project looks interesting - thanks.
Yes, many times google is the way to go at the reference desk. And often students seem to take their prof’s admonition too seriously - “You must only use library resources, not the internet, for this project.” I often end up saying to the student… “Your professor doesn’t need to know that you found this (report, book, article, text from the Congressional Record, Supreme Court Reports or whatever)from a google search - then you found it on the shelf in the library!”
10:16 pm on November 26th, 2003 2
I just had a student ask if it was OK to cite websites that give better, more up to date explanations of some basics than the most recent textbooks in a narrow area. Since the texts were written in the ’60’s, I said sure, as long as current or detailed stuff comes from reviewed literature. I’ve seen librarians blush when they admitted using Google — the way 14 year old guys used to blush when they admitted looking at Playboy back when that was considered risque.