No Question Is Too Inane, Obscure, Odd for Reference Line
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The New York Public Library’s telephone reference department works out of a room at the mid-Manhattan branch, a boxy-looking structure across the street from its more famous, lion-guarded sibling.The librarians and information assistants, 10 in total, sit around the perimeter of the room with their backs facing out. They break regularly to consult the 2,000 reference books in the room’s center.
The telephone reference line, 212-340-0849, is open for business 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday to Saturday. Callers are granted three to five minutes of a librarian’s time and can ask anything they’re wondering about. No question is too inane: How did the Dixie cup get its name? What is the middle part of a pencil called? Why is the name William shortened to Bill? What time does my branch close today?
There are some limits. Library policy states that librarians are not permitted to give dream interpretations, philosophical answers, solutions to contest questions, assessments of used cars, medical or legal advice, product evaluations, or detailed research for school papers.”If they have a paper, we won’t write it,” the associate chief librarian at the mid-Manhattan library, Lucia Chen, said.”We try to show them tools, not the answers.”
The telephone service has been around since 1963; an e-mail service was launched in 2000. A real-time “chat” service that was introduced in 2002 is available a few hours a week.During the first year of e-mail inquiries, the library received about 1,000 questions; last year there were 13,398. Those who submit their questions by e-mail must wait 24 hours for an answer, but there’s a tradeoff: Via e-mail, they can present librarians with more demanding questions than those that can be dealt with during a quick telephone call.
Ninety-three unanswered questions were on the Internet system one day late last week, and the team of telephone reference librarians was working on them between calls. The queries came from points across the world. Most of them had to do with genealogy, but there was also a second-grade teacher looking for nonfiction picture books about Native Americans, somebody wanting to know when and where Winston Churchill said “All great things are simple,” and a diligent cardholder writing to say “Dear Madam / Sir,I owe three books. I am just letting you know I am out of town and they should arrive to the library by DHL today.”
“We get a lot of ‘What time are you open today?’ or ‘I lost my PIN number,'” the telephone reference desk’s supervising librarian, Harriet Shalat, said. “But a lot of the time it’s neat stuff, too.”
Ms. Shalat stopped to pick up her phone.Somebody was calling to find out if there was such a thing as an art magazine called Bomb. Next to her, senior librarian Carol Anshein was consulting a Web page and telling the person on the other end of the line that a “rootworker” is someone who casts spells.
In its entire history, the telephone reference line has had only three chiefs. Ms. Shalat’s predecessor, Barbara Berliner, who wrote “The Book of Answers: The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service’s Most Unusual and Entertaining Questions,” stops in every week. The longest-serving member of the telephone reference team, Valerie Stegmayer, has been answering calls for 28 years. When she started, she said, she could use the dictionary, the almanac, or the encyclopedia to answer 90% of the questions that came her way. She said people used to call in December to ask what Santa’s reindeer were named or what the 12 days of Christmas stood for.
When Prince Charles married Diana Spencer in 1981, she saw an influx of calls about royalty. With Desert Storm, people started calling to ask about differences in weapons, and when the Soviet Union was broken apart, she received a great deal of phone calls about all the new countries. “We had to spell out the names a lot,” she said.The most popular topic today is hurricanes and, more specifically, Hurricane Katrina.
Librarians are not allowed to ask why people are calling. Callers don’t identify themselves by name, but the librarians say they have come to feel like they know many of the regulars. There is one very nice young man who calls every day with questions about prominent African-Americans in history; they think he must be a graduate student. Another familiar voice belongs – they think – to an ophthalmologist’s secretary. “She’s always asking ‘Is this grammatical?’ and she’ll read a sentence with ophthalmology terms in it,” Ms.Anshein said.”I’ve never asked her straight out.”
One of the quieter librarians, Bernard Van Maarseveen, was hunched over his workstation, looking through questions that had recently come through the system. He stopped at one, whose sender had written “I want a Web site to download that can tell me the exact Web site I am really thinking of in my mind right now.”In his detailed response, Mr. Van Maarseveen replied that he did not know of such a site, but he attached articles on brain scans,CAT scans, the history of mind reading, and a story he’d found on the way search engines like Google try to determine what a user is looking for. “We try to take it seriously,” Mr.Van Maarseveen said.
At the end of the letter, he couldn’t resist adding “If you do find the Web site you’re looking for, please let us know, either by e-mail or telepathically.”
