Questions, Questions

In part of an afternoon shift we had:

• a hold for Philip Roth's American Pastoral;
• Interlibrary Loan requests for a book about Federal Taxation of Debt Instruments, for Tolkien's book of essays with Beowulf in the title, and for something else I didn't scribble on my little list;
• a man who wanted to figure out what kind of business he was applying to before faxing them a resumé (only an address and fax number given in the classifieds) ;
• visitors who wanted to find material about the TB sanatorium that was once at Valmora, NM;
• a man who couldn't figure out how to do a find-and-replace with diacritics characters in Word;
• someone researching a magazine article about exploration disasters and outdoors disasters, and already had enough Everest and enough polar material (gave him Timothy Treadwell, the Burke and Wills expedition, and some Sahara books) ;
• and someone who needed the microfiche of the November 2003 issue of Harper's Magazine to copy a perfectly wonderful story by Annie Dillard, "The Two of Them". I got him set up and left him back there to make his copy. He returned with TWO COPIES so he could give one to me!

       You don't have to be on the desk to learn what people need. You might be simply walking in the stacks, and find a questioner who needs to go in three directions at once: to Children’s for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, to Reference to put a hold on Potter, to the right shelf in fiction for 1984.