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.
Tags: chicago, dillinger, ghosts, greece, holidays, latvia, libraries, reference, women
