Librarian as sleuth

It doesn’t happen often, but at the moment I have at least three different posts, about names and identity, tradition and customs, and conferences, my dislike of, percolating in my head (and my notebook) but none of them are ready for posting yet. So I have nothing particular to post this morning. I’ve even been tagged to do a meme (thanks, Ivan!), but it needs Technorati, which seems to be a bit sluggish at the moment and I can’t bear the waiting.

Come to think of it, everything seems slow this morning: me, the connection to the Net (maybe I should restart the modem), Baubles the Cat (she’s snoozing at my feet).

Yesterday was a relatively productive day. Apart from all the usual, I managed to finish one task which had been bugging me for a while. Just before Christmas an academic gave me a photocopy of a newspaper article that he said he’d been “using” in his classes for years, but over the years he’d lost the bibliographic details and had no idea where he got the original article from, or even when, and could I please see if I could find out for him?

All he could tell me was that he thought it would have been from anytime between 1989 and 1993. All I could do was read the article closely and try and take ‘educated’ guesses. Thankfully, the article was about an event – the collapse of the Bank of New England – and not a vague op-ed piece. I found out that the collapse of said bank occurred in January 1991. Good.

Next step was a bit more tenuous. I stared at the font the article was printed in – a bit of a chancey thing because copies of newsprint are often a bit fuzzy (or maybe the font got fuzzy because I stared at it so hard) – and decided that it kind of perhaps matched the font that articles in The Australian are printed in. Maybe.

There was nothing else for it. I’d already done a Google search using the headline, and looked through Factiva (our main source for newspaper articles online), but had run up against the usual problem: once you get beyond say the late 1990s or 2000s, it can be quite hit and miss trying to locate things electronically. For an old newspaper article, I was going to have to get reacquainted with the microfilm reader.

After digging up the reel containing the January 1 1991 – January 31 1991 issues of The Australian, I decided not to mangle the microfilm or my fingers too much, and got a colleague to show me how to thread the film through the combined microfiche/microfilm reader. Thankfully, that was pretty simple, apart from the one tense moment after my collague had left and I accidentally rewound all the film and had to start over.

In case it hasn’t been obvious, I haven’t used microfilm very much during my short career as a librarian. The last time I used microfilm in great amounts was during my stint as a research assistant, in the mid-1990s… I’d forgotten how dizzying nauseating it can be watching all that film scroll through when you fast forward through the days hoping an article will appear.

Going through the newspaper from the beginning of distant 1991, I learned that there had been floods in Queensland during the New Year period, amused myself looking at cartoons lampooning our then-Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and tried to remember to keep a look out for the key words of the headline I needed to find. I tried not to think about what I would do if the article didn’t appear in any of the January 1991 issues of The Australian. I tried not to think about how dizzy I was getting. Suddenly, thankfully, the familiar headline popped up, in the January 8 1991 issue of the paper! Because I was in a ‘silent’ area of the library, I restrained myself from whooping and told myself I wasn’t that dizzy that I needed to lie on the floor to recover, noted the details, and went off and emailed the academic. He’ll never know how much anxiety his simple request generated in me. I wonder what sort of a blow my professional self-confidence would have taken if I’d failed…

(If I’d failed, I’m sure I would have recovered, I just liked ending on a somewhat dramatic note! And in case I gave the impression that it was torturous all the way, I actually like requests like these. I like the sense of challenge, the satisfaction of finding the answer and the boost it gives to the Know-It-All aspect of my ego. And did I actually say I had nothing to post this morning?)

Update 7:35pm: The academic who made the request replied to my email this morning, thanking me and telling me that he’d tried “on and off for TWO years to find the details!” I responded that he should’ve just gotten me on the case earlier…

Picture from www.art-omma.org/projectroom/n8/further.htm

Categories: librarianship