Catch Up

I keep forgetting about the Internet! (Or rather, the little pieces of it I’ve staked out for my personal use..)

A quick run-down of interesting questions since I last posted:

• January 5th, 2009 (this one slipped through)
  Searching for information/books/articles on the inventor of one of the first pressure suits. Preliminary work by other librarians had the name – “Eugene Chertanovsky” – but searches were not getting far. Further search revealed multiple spellings of the subject, including “Eugene Chertanovskaja”, “Evgeniy Chertanovskiy”, and “E. E. Chertovsky”. Variants revealed some sources, including a book on space exploration in the building and a Google Book in its entirety with a full paragraph on the inventor of the Ch-1 pressure suit (knowing the name of the suit ended up being how I found the alternate spellings).
  Conclusion: WIN. Translations of Cyrillic spellings are tricky; always better to have more to work from.
• January 7th, 2009 (also slipped through.. mostly because it’s just a brief anecdote)
  A patron was having trouble finding a topic and I showed her how I would go about doing the search on a patron-interface catalog (as opposed to our super-user catalog interfaces). She asked, in a joking tone, if I went to school to learn that. I kind of paused and said, yes, I have been trained in how to do information searches. I mean, we do have library school – what do people think we learn there? Memorizing the Dewey Decimal System and how to shush..? \:| (Then again, I still have people say to me “you have to go to school to be a librarian??” Shocking, isn’t it…)
• Sometime last month
  A young man came in wanting information on Eastern Canada during the 11th through 13th centuries… We could find general information on tribes (on the Internet) that were spread across the region prior to that time period, specific information about tribes and Viking incursions in Central and Western Canada during the tail end of that time period, information about all regions of Canada starting in the 17th and 18th century, and information about modern lives of native peoples from Canada and the Northern U.S. … But we’re a small urban library in the U.S. – why would anyone expect us to have stuff on pre-recorded history Canada..? Oh, and he needed it for a report due within the next couple of days, so interlibrary loans were no use.
  Conclusion: An incredibly predictable FAIL. I think he said he would ask if he could change his time period/region (I’m not entirely sure, but I think he selected the starting set himself.. ?:/ )
• Sometime this past week (Thursday..?)
  A patron wanted information on New York, specifically the aspects of it that made it unique as compared to other cities around the country. This led to a discussion of what features would make New York different from other cities, like Chicago, L.A., etc. We ended up deciding the city’s general diversity, proximity to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, the presence of the United Nations, island/burroughs structure, and subway system all constituted unique facets, whereas Tammany Hall (and corruption), buildings in general, and their educational system did not.
  Conclusion: WIN. We got him a number of books and got some focus for his report. Plus, interesting conversation on the evolution of cities.

Tripping Over Language Barriers

Twice within one week I encountered significant language barriers, once each at the two libraries in which I work. I’m in sympathy with the poor patron because we’re mutually frustrated by the inability to communicate. I want to help you find what you’re looking for; really! And I’m sure you’re not trying to be as unhelpful as it seems!

The first time was a disabled patron whose speech was just not very clear. Unfortunately, neither was his handwriting, as he authoritatively presented me with a note and wandered off. I spent some time trying to hunt up the apparent author (only to later discover that it was the patron’s name written at the top) but couldn’t reconcile it with the apparent title (from the words I could decipher). For that matter, I was having trouble confirming the existence of anything resembling what I took to be the title. I tried to elicit some more information from the patron, but we got nowhere. Fortunately, I’d noticed the patron had come in with another person and approached that patron for help. She told me that what he was really looking for was cowboy hats (I’d been searching for what looked like something about astronomy or physics). This, too, was a sort of vague information request, being secondhand and all, but I latched on to it as something. Fishing out a number of books with illustrations of cowboys (and their hats), I offered them to the patron, only to be initially rebuffed. I think this was more miscommunication, because he ended up coming back to them. I even found a book in the youth department that had two whole pages of just hats!
Conclusion: WIN/FAIL? I really don’t know. :/

The second occasion was at my subbing library. A gentleman came up to the desk with a heavy accent. Of course, I suppose he could’ve been thinking the same of me. Or maybe I just spoke too fast. In any case, we went back and forth a few frustrating rounds to determine he needed some forms off the Internet (though not the site he initially indicated). Now, policies on printing vary from library to library and strictness of application of said policy can vary from department to department and librarian to librarian. On the whole, we would like our patrons to go away with their information need satisfied. We also would like to get patrons acclimated to our services and learn to do things for themselves. And, crass as it is to point out, well, we’d like you to pay for your printing. Most people do, so it’s kind of unfair for one dude to get 300+ pages for free (yes, that’s happened – twice; it was a case of upper management making the call). This case wasn’t that bad, but it was more than 30 pages and… the patron asserted that he didn’t have a computer and wanted me to do it all for him.
See, this is an almost irresistible lure for me because I really, really want people not to be afraid of computers. It’s okay to sit down and poke at them! Ours come with a program called DeepFreeze, so no matter what you do (especially in terms of the capabilities of patrons who aren’t familiar with computers), it’ll all reset when you log off! I coaxed the patron over to the computers and logged him onto one, showing him the website, doing all the tricky bits and repeating that it was simple – he could just click here and here and his print would go to the printer. I tried to explain the printing process (get a card, pay for it, pages come out of the printer), but either the language barrier or a disinclination to pay for prints or both led the patron to wander off disgruntled.
We do not like it when patrons are disgruntled.
(Though I gotta say I was sans gruntle by this point myself.)
The patron huffed into a chair near the desk while another patron (who a) was apparently with the first, b) blithely interrupted me when the first patron was still trying to ask his question, and c) was familiar enough with computers that I wondered why he wasn’t trying to help the other patron.. :\ ) solicited my help in navigating some of the quirks of the express computers. In this interval, the first patron apparently retrieved his gruntledness enough to approach the desk again. I was still annoyed with the matter (and a bit with his manner), but this was the point to just get it over with and print his pages for him. He was willing to offer me a quarter, I believe it was, (which I graciously ignored) for the 15 or so pages I printed for him. He also admonished me not to “be mad with” him. I promised him I wasn’t mad, just vexed by the printer (it was out of paper). So he got about half of what he was seeking and that for free.
Conclusion: Sort of WIN for patron satisfaction, fairly FAIL for policy consistency, communication, and capitalist economy. …so, 3/4 (+/- some) FAIL.

In other news, I kind of need to learn to read and speak Polish.

So Savvy

Genuine treasure hunt! Where “treasure” equals “information need”! I’m just showing my nerd colors when I get excited about an info hunt that keeps transforming, I guess, but it sure keeps things interesting.

See, it all started last week, when a patron came in looking for the Summer 2008 edition of Savvy, a magazine. I went and looked on WorldCat, (World Library Catalog, connected to hundreds of libraries worldwide), found a magazine by that title, and told the patron I’d send the request through. Done.

Except not. I was not properly thorough when I first placed the request. (Bad librarian! No martini!) I jotted down “Summer 2008 issue” without noting that the holdings listed for that magazine title’s record indicated that issues only ran from 1980-1988..! My error was caught by the interlibrary loan clerk who went to process the order. She passed it to another reference librarian, “M”, who did some research and brought it back to me since she had to get to a meeting today. “M” found the publication range for the listing of Savvy, as well as the next incarnation’s title: Savvy Woman. However, Savvy Woman only ran from 1988-1991. Still not done! She also printed out a list of the libraries that claimed to have recent holdings of the title and located Savvy online and got their corporate headquarter’s phone number. (”M” is thorough. She may have a martini.)

Starting from where “M” left off, I first tried to contact the Urbana Free Library, the only public library that WorldCat indicated had current issues (”Recent plus 5 years” being the claim). They checked but did not come up with any sign that they currently held the title. This sometimes happens with WorldCat – their records can be out-dated or just plain wrong. :/ Moving on!

I next contacted the Savvy magazine to try and track the title incarnations. The very helpful lady who answered the phone told me that this Savvy was in fact brand new, having only started publishing at the beginning of the year. Quite possibly the magazine that the patron was looking for, but not in any libraries that the lady was aware of. She very kindly offered to mail us whichever article the patron was seeking, which I thanked her for and told her I’d check back with the patron.

Calling back the patron, I was able to elicit some more information. (A thorough librarian tries to get all this up front, though one never knows when a simple enough request is going to turn out to be twisty… still – no martini.) The patron sought an article by one April Williams about improving your job search. Next step, call back to Savvy and ask about that article. The nice lady informed me that that did not sound like their kind of article; perhaps the patron meant Business Savvy?

Business Savvy does not appear to have a website (”business savvy” “magazine” does not turn up anything, anyway). Hmmm… Next, a database – Article First; is Business Savvy included in its myriad collected publications? No. How about another database, EBSCO’s MasterFile Premier? No? Bother. Well, let’s start from scratch – we’re looking for something to do with “savvy” and “april williams”, right? Google it. Hey now! Here is an April Williams who speaks about job searching… And she links to a SAVVY Magazine, Summer 2008! There’s the article we were looking for and a little backtracking reveals that this is the Women In Technology International (WITI) publication, also named SAVVY. Success!

Conclusion: Similar-sounding titles are proliferate – the more info the better! (’Couldn’t come up with a more pithy summary; I mostly tried for riffs on “savvy” and “witi” (witty), but I fail.)

BTUs, BTW

A patron wanted to know the average heating usage for 1-bedroom apartments, from October 2007 through March 2008. I warned the patron that this specific a data set was unlikely to be available. The patron reiterated that this was the data sought, regardless. It turned into one of those patron: “this is what I want, what I want is this”, me: “I’ll let you know what I find” exchanges that circle until the patrons stops talking. Those are fun! (no, they’re not)

Anyway. Manner of inquiry aside, I was correct in that I could not find that specific a data set for that recent a time span. However! Older data does get into that kind of specificity.

I started by looking for “average” “home”/”winter” “heating”, neither of which presented much in the way of fruitful returns. I added in the term “thermal units” because the patron had dropped that phrase a half dozen times, indicating that it was the usage, not the cost, that was of interest. This also did not directly lead me to answers, but it did cause “British thermal units” to crop up in a number of returns. That looked familiar and then I saw a page blurb with the abbreviation and went “oh, duh.”

This led to a rearrangement of search terms – now I sought “average” “home” “btu”. Much better. Right away I found a 1997 survey report which showed average residential consumption from the Energy Information Administration, a subset of the U.S. Department of Energy. Backtracking through that site, I was able to find a pair of Residential Energy Consumption Surveys from 2005 that showed average consumption in BTUs for fuel used and energy end use. Further perusal of the site’s resources showed monthly and annual reports on residential energy use, but that was all in total usage, no averages. Furthermore, the two 2005 survey reports included break downs by housing type and size (”apartment, 2-4 units/building”, “apartment, 5 or more units/building”, “1-person household”, “2-person household”, etc.).

Conclusion: Invest in blankets.

WhoIs Cool?

Yes. Yes it is.

So a patron came to the desk looking for contact information for one Giada De Laurentiis. This turns out to be a celebrity chef type of person with a multi-faceted website that totally does not offer contact information of any kind. I dug through all the various tabs and site sections to conclude this. If the patron had been interested in signing up for the chef’s website, there’s a chance that a message could’ve been sent through that medium, but the patron was really looking for a phone number or snail mail address.

I kept looking, trying “giada de laurentiis” “contact” as a general search – finding her Wikipedia and Food Network pages, a site that purports to have her publisher’s address, but you need to sign-up to get the whole thing, and a Google Answers page that led me to WhoIs.net. I vaguely recall having seen this web database before, but I could definitely appreciate its usefulness in this context. The Google Answers page actually had differing information from what I found when I ran the search on whois.net myself; with over 2 years’ difference, it’s not surprising ownership has shifted a bit. I don’t know how “new” Giada De Laurentiis was in 2006, but apparently her husband bought/registered the site for her then and her company, GDL Foods, is who’s listed as the site owner now. I was able to give the patron both the then-contact information for De Laurentiis’ husband and the current information for her company.

Conclusion: WhoIs da bomb.

Zipping Through the Crawford Ranch Code

This one turned out to be a little trickier than expected. Though I did come up with the right answer within a minute, I couldn’t get a locked-in confirmation that the answer was the right answer, for sure. See, here’s how it went…

A patron called in, seeking the zip code for Crawford, TX. This was easily located by searching for “Crawford, TX” and “zip code” – the code is 76638. However, then the patron clarified that what they really wanted was the zip code for the Crawford Ranch (apparently properly called the Prairie Chapel Ranch), President George W. Bush’s private ranch. A couple of searches for “crawford ranch” “tx” and “crawford ranch” “address” did not prove very useful (though I did find a sort of appallingly funny parody page for “The Western White House“: Crawford’s official motto is “1295 miles from Washington DC, 97% White, and ARMED TO THE TEETH!”). You could map it on Google Maps, but not get the actual address. So I switched tactics – having obtained a map of the region, I went looking for a zip code map that I could browse. Searching for “zip code” “map” “tx”, I located an interactive map at Hip Codes.com. I zoomed and clicked and dragged until I found the region I wanted, which proved to actually be very close to the border between 76638 and 76689. The pin from Google maps falls on the -38 side, though, so I figured that must be the correct zip code.

Conclusion: Mail the president!

Human Cannon Balls

Submitted to me verbally, following a brief discussion of air cannons:

“How do those cannons they shoot people out of work?”

Searching for “circus” “cannons” returned the Cannon-Mania website, which holds that the “how” of human cannon balls is a circus trade secret. Nevertheless, a couple of other sites (found through switching to “human” “cannon”) have individuals holding forth their hypotheses, based on some outside knowledge of physics.

Physics Forums.com: How do you shoot a man out of a cannon?
– Posits include:

• Compressed air blasts with flash-pots for the explosive appearance
• Giant spring
• Bungee cord

Naked Science Forum: Shooting people from cannons
– Posits include:

• Careful calculations for how much powder will propel how much human, with some sort of seal (posited: a beard ) used to prevent expanding gasses from leaking prematurely
• The use of “wad” between the charge and projectile (human) to improve the seal and to protect the projectile (human) from the heat of the gas/blast
• Springs, again

Further prodding of the Intertubes (”human” “cannon” “how”) confirms some of this postulating, according to citations found on Wikipedia’s entry on Human cannonballs (the citiations comes from a question answered on Straight Dope.com and a BBC News story. How reputable this Cecil Adams (Straight Dope) guy is is up in the air (did you see the pun there? ha!) – he’s got a syndicated column in some newspapers, though his site link to the list is broken. It is at least carried by the Chicago Reader and the Washington City Paper as I found when searching for “straight dope” “column”. Other than that, hard to say.
Summary of the entry/article: Spring (for the first human cannonballs) or, more commonly, compressed air below a platform on which the human cannonballs stand.

Conclusion: It’s the >whoosh!< that does it.

Scattered Searches

So I had a few queries that I didn’t get around to writing out (again) lined up.  I wrote them down on pieces of paper that were temporarily in my possesion and then promptly lost them.  This is why I write most things I mean to remember on my hand.  You can’t lose your hands.  (This is a lie.)

Anyway! Some things I recall:

• Women’s Day – A patron was seeking resources about a somewhat obscure holiday known as Women’s Day.  Initial searches came up with the magazine but not much else.  A bit of Googling and browsing led to the full name of the holiday – International Women’s Day.  The patron offered, in the spirit of helpfulness, I’m sure, the date of the holiday (March 8th).  This didn’t really help, but hey! Fun fact!
  We did end up finding a book the patron was satisfied with by going through WorldCat – a cooperative catalog of every participating library in the world (there are hundreds, if not thousands of participating libraries – go collective information sharing!). I simply searched as keywords “international women’s day” and a number of results came back. One, From abortion to reproductive freedom : transforming a movement seemed initially promising, but didn’t pan out. We hit jackpot with another title, though: A century of women : the most influential events in twentieth-century women’s history, which had a whole section on the first International Women’s Day.
  Conclusion: Yay WorldCat’s much more detailed catalog records! Cooperative cataloging rocks!

• Latvian Easter, Greek Yule – In a similar vein, another set of patrons were looking for holiday-related reference works on Latvian Easter and a Greek Yuletide holiday, if I remember correctly… unless it was the other way around. :/ In any case, the best I could offer either patron after fruitless searches for the specific name of one of their holidays (Paninki? Something else that might’ve started with “p”..?) and general searches for those nations’ holidays, were a few items on world holidays.
  Conclusion: fail (not FAIL, but still fail).
• Dillinger’s Last Show – A patron was looking for information on Chicago ghost stories, in general, and the story she knew of as “Dillinger’s Last Show”, specifically. I found very little searching for that phrase, but when I broadened the search to “Dillinger”, “chicago” and “ghost”, I discovered the story of the Biograph Theater and how Dillinger is purported to lurk in its back alley. From there, I was still batting 0 in terms of actual items in the collection that the patron hadn’t already collected, but we did end up getting some biographies on Dillinger on the off-chance they’d talk about his death and legends following thereafter (it wasn’t clear if the works accomplished this from quick perusals).
  Conclusion: Semi-fail – the patron accepted the cited story printed off of http://www.prairieghosts.com/dillinger.html, with the understanding that it appeared to have come from Haunted Illinois, which the library did not carry, but it wasn’t quite what the patron was looking for. Other ghost legend books were checked out, but we didn’t find the patron any new books.

Reflections On Unshared Questions…

So, I didn’t get around to posting about some reference questions when I got them (and therefore the procedures are lost in the mists of poor recollection), but there are some questions that are just… a bit unsettling.

Example: A patron wished to know the precise composition of goat and human milk. The patron felt the need to reiterate, several times, that it was the composition of human milk that was important. Not just proteins, but minerals and so forth. Human milk. Yes, okay, thank you, got it… :/

(P.S. I imagine it was a fairly straightforward search that lead me to these resources – ‘human goat milk composition’ or something – but here’s what I ended up giving the patron:
Composition of Human, Cow, and Goat Milk
& a paragraph or two from Breast Milk @ Wikipedia (Yes, yes, cutting corners, but I went w/ the cited stuff, at least; I had time constraints, unfortunately.))

Polls & Statistics

There are so many polls out there, conducted by different organizations on different issues.  Where can I go if I need to find a poll result, like, how many Americans support stem cell research, etc?  Also what about general statistics, like the U.S.’s ranking in the world in terms of research facilities, or whatever?

Personally, I would say that, depending on the statistic/poll query you seek, you may not be able to find an all-encompassing source that addresses every topic, all in one handy location.  There are, of course, some big-name places that are likely to have looked at a lot of the hot topics.  I started out with the specific examples offered – stem cell research and ranking in research facilities.

Stem Cell Research

Googling poll opinion and “stem cell” brought me to a 2004 Harris Poll and a 2005 News report on stem cell research opinions.  Harris Interactive Polls in general seems to have a lot of data, but the search function is pretty weak: I can’t tell the date from the results list, there’s no option to sort your search by date – you can browse by year, but there seems to be no combination of the search features.  Furthermore, searching will give you Poll and News results, but the two categories don’t have the same browsing spans.  Browsing is for more recent years only, though results from earlier may be posted. 
Conclusion: If recency isn’t a pressing issue, then Harris would be okay, but it’s not the most convenient.

Much more navigable, by comparison, is the Polling Report. They address issues primarily from a political viewpoint, it seems, but a summary list of 22 polls from 2001-2008 (mostly from a handful of the same sources, but over time) on stem cell research opinions links from the Issues section on the main page. Something that Harris offered that Polling Report does not, however, is analysis (well, there’s a “News & Analysis” section, but it’s just links to other news sites and doesn’t appear to be searchable). Polling Report is fairly bare bones – the source, date, question, and response percentages. Looking into the Issues section further, it seems that stem cell research really falls under the category of Science & Nature under “American Scene” – a barely noticeable navigation option in the site directory, on the left-hand side of the main page.
Conclusion: It’s a kind of busy and confusing layout, but still more straight-forward and browsable than Harris.

Pew Research Center is a very reputable source for polling data and it offers some in-depth analyses along with straight-up percentage reports. One example of the combination is the 2005 Political Typology report. You can browse by the tabs at the top and read the whole report (with a few sentences analyzing this particular issue) in addition to viewing the percentage breakdown by respondent type for issue questions. Pew is a complicated site, with different publication sections, like the Reports (stem cell sample), Analysis & Commentary, News Stories, and Event Transcripts/Interviews. There are also assorted Project Centers which address topics from different aspects, like the Pew Research Center for People & the Press (where a lot of public opinion stuff can be found), Pew Internet & American Life Project (where I look for most of my Internet-related stats, personally), Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life (stem cell sample), Pew Global Attitudes Project, and Social & Demographic Trends, as well as a couple others that aren’t necessarily pertinent to this question. Additionally, there’s an advanced search function which will let you search with Boolean operators (AND, OR), phrases in quotation marks, and specify which project section of the Pew sites to search, to narrow things down.
Conclusion: A versatile and fairly handy source for a broad range of topics.

I’m going to throw in Public Agenda, too, as a site that manages to display data in plain speech pretty well, dates is results list, & both searches and browses fairly easily. Plus: Pie Charts!
Conclusion: Plain language is user-friendly, as are easy-to-follow graphics. Throw in solid data and this is a decent source for summary information and visual representations.

Ranking in Research Facilities
This one was a bit trickier. “Stem cell research” doesn’t have too many variations and it falls pretty clearly under a few categories (”medicine” and/or “science” and “morality” and/or “religion”, primarily). The concept of “research facilities” may also be referred to as “research institutes”, “research output”, “scientific citations”, etc. and may fall indistinctly and erratically under categories like “education”, “science”, “technology”, “medicine”, “environment”, and “industry”… or not.
Googling statistics world ranking research, alternating plain “research” with “research institutes” and “research facilities” to start, gives me some potentially starting points, but few of the initial results seem to be as obviously pertinent as those in the stem cell research opinion polls search.

NationMaster looks like a nice all-purpose site, but while it covers quite a few specific angles on a wide array of topics, it doesn’t really seem to look specifically at who has the most or best research facilities. The closest we come is “Education statistics > Scientific and technical journal articles (most recent) by country”. In this category, the U.S. has ranked #1 from 1981-2003 (the latest date offered in this particular statistic).
Conclusion: If what you’re looking for is what NationMaster has done a study on, congratulations. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep looking…

Another result that cropped up was the Webometrics Ranking Web of World R&D Centers. The site says that “[t]he original aim of the Ranking was to promote Web publication, not to rank institutions… However web indicators are very useful for ranking purposes too as they are not based on number of visits or page design but global performance and visibility”. The criteria for ranking, particularly for Research Output (Rich Files and Google Scholar citations) seems a little… weak, to me. I wouldn’t want to depend wholly or even primarily on web publishing as the means by which I assess research output, even as digital publication continues to gain ground.
Conclusion: An interesting way of looking at the citation production of various institutes, but not necessarily the most complete assessment.

Having browsed a bit through fairly indirect or outright fruitless results, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s going to be citations that reveal the research rankings (though most of the results so far seem to focus on universities as the sole type of research facility), so I change my search query to world citation ranking. This leads me to an article talking about the top research universities of America, which mentions Science Watch as having done a study using “citation impact to assess… scientific performance”. This sounds promising, so I find the Science Watch website.

Data & Rankings is a prominent navigation bar, with a subcategory titled “Country Profiles”. Following that link, I’m a bit disappointed to see the site doesn’t seem to offer a complete profile for every country, but rather spotlights a certain country each month. However, the Featured Country articles list is peppered with articles about the Top 20 Countries in Clinical Medicine, Geoscience, and Physics and the Top 10 Countries in Chemistry. A little narrower than the initial inquiry, but more specific doesn’t necessarily hurt. I browse onward to find that older data (2001-January 2008) is available, through the Archives link in the sidebar. A few locations for archives are listed, but for world research rankings you want in-cites’ Countries section.
Conclusion: It looks like this is the site to address this particular aspect of your question (research and world rankings) best, but it might not suit broader topics.

“General statistics”-wise, it really does depend on what types of statistics you’re looking for. Military? Technology? Economy? Gender equity? Political? Entertainment? Environmental? Other..? Some of these coincide (ex. CIA World Factbook, NationMaster, U.S. Census Bureau, United Nations Statistics Division, and GeoHive) and some you’d be better off focusing on developing a narrower search strategy to find specialized databases/resources.

Does this answer your question? Do you have any further questions?