Responding to the increasing popularity of texting over phoning, the Barnett-Briggs Medical Library has begun a new Text-A-Librarian service. "Why", you may ask, "would I ever want to text a librarian?" Since you asked, let me digress and tell you a story about the olden days, that is, pre-Google days, when librarians provided what was quaintly called "Reference Service".
We had a collection of books quaintly called "the reference section". These books consisted of now-antiquated publications such as directories, almanacs, yearbooks, gazeteers, encyclopedias, dictionaries, indexes, etc., and we pretty much knew what was in each one of them. So when someone asked a question, which they did frequently, we would go straightaway to the reference section, pull off the most likely book and look in the index to find the answer.
Librarians would deal with homework questions, settle bar arguments, such as the number of home runs hit by "X" in the World Series of 19XX, advise homemakers on the correct formulation of a bouquet garni for the evening's stew, etc., or show authors how to figure out which publishers would most likely be interested in their manuscripts. In the case of medical librarians in those pre-Medline days, we would look up journal articles on specific topics in something called "Index Medicus", which came out monthly and were cumulated into a huge annual volume. Considering the size of the print, it was a wonder we ever found anything.
Back to the present day and the original question: Why, when you have all the resources of the Internet at your veritable fingertips and all the power of Google at your command, would you ever need or want to ask a librarian a question? It's because you have all the resources of the Internet at your veritable fingertips and all the power of Google at your command. You have access to so much information that, as the Big Blue Book says, you realize that your life has become unmanageable, at least as far as the information part goes.
Librarians can narrow down those 2,345,644,677 Google hits and give you only those that are recent, authoritative, and applicable to your question. You want only evidence-based articles? Maybe only systematic reviews? Editorials? Only articles by enzymologists in Zaire if, in fact, there are enzymologists in Zaire? Need a handout on smoking cessation in Serbo-Croatian? Interested in up-to-date information on the link between anti-perspirants and breast cancer, or the lack of a correlation?
Those are all good reasons to text us. We are standing, well sitting actually, by the phone ready to text you back with good answers to your questions, thus saving you hours of precious time and those uncomfortable feelings of uncertainty that can accompany unanswered questions. Text to 66746 and start your text with the keyword sfgh. Do it now!
