Real reference questions
Jan. 28th, 2008 08:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoTwo of them in one day. That's more than I've had in, oh several months I think. Harvard doesn't generate actual reference questions, only just "Where's the bathroom?" and the kind where you point out the dictionary or encyclopedia. But, this morning, before the doors were open and in fact when I was the only one there, an older man called and wanted to know whether it was true that Jane Wyman had died and if so, when. I actually had to ask him to call back in an hour because we weren't open yet, the lights weren't even on, and the computers weren't up. But I got his answer and left it with the front desk for when he called back later (and he actually did call back.) Jane Wyman (first wife of Ronald Reagan, and a movie actress herself) died in September of 2007 at her home in California. She was 90 years old.
An "almost" reference question in mid afternoon involved obituary information for someone who died in the nearby village of Alden in the mid-1950s. Since the caller didn't have even an approximate date of death, but only a year off a tombstone, I referred her to the county clerk first. I don't have the time to look through a year or more of old newspapers for an obituary. We require a date within a week or so.
The other real question came just before I left for the day. Someone recalled reading a science fiction story, probably in the 1950s, in which a ship from Earth went to visit a "forgotten" colony. He remembered it as a colony made up of people from an insane asylum, who had developed a society and culture that worked for them, but confused the visitors. This seemed naggingly familiar, and I knew I had read something like it. What I remembered was The Great Explosion, a 1962 novel by Eric Frank Russell that won a Prometheus award several years later, after the author was already dead. It had that sort of scenario, with a ship from the Terran empire revisiting several "lost" colonies that had been isolated for centuries. One colony was a former penal colony and had the sort of mob government and so forth that you might expect. Another was founded by naturists and nudists, and their descendants were so physically perfect and healthy that the Terran visitors felt quite inferior and embarrassed. The last, which took the greater part of the book, had been founded by political refugees, anarchists who called themselves "Gands" after Mahatma Gandhi. This would have been the insane asylum reference, as the visitors thought it must have originated with an insane asylum. There was an obviously functional and complex culture and economy, yet there was no government at all, no laws, and no crime. The Terrans couldn't grasp a world economy built on barter and social obligation, with no weapons and no police force, yet they were confronted with such a system and it obviously worked. The problem was, 1962 was too late for the time frame wanted. Then I discovered that the novel was in fact an expansion of a short story by the same author, published in 1951 in Astounding Science Fiction with the title "...And Then There Were None." I think this must be the story that was sought, but won't know for sure until a couple of days from now probably.
Temperature got up to 41F today, and Gary did get the stuck barn door open. He scraped away enough earth to prevent a recurrence, we hope. We'll find out soon enough. It's raining now and tonight's low temperature is supposed to be only 38F but tomorrow the temperature will drop from a morning high of 40F all the way to -2F for a night-time low. Rain in the morning will change to sleet and flurries and then to snow, with up to two inches accumulation. That isn't too bad, since most of what we had on the ground melted or sublimed away today. However, that frigid low isn't so great. The heating technician will be back tomorrow morning, but I give no better than 50-50 odds that he'll fix the problem. Fortunately, we have plenty of firewood.
An "almost" reference question in mid afternoon involved obituary information for someone who died in the nearby village of Alden in the mid-1950s. Since the caller didn't have even an approximate date of death, but only a year off a tombstone, I referred her to the county clerk first. I don't have the time to look through a year or more of old newspapers for an obituary. We require a date within a week or so.
The other real question came just before I left for the day. Someone recalled reading a science fiction story, probably in the 1950s, in which a ship from Earth went to visit a "forgotten" colony. He remembered it as a colony made up of people from an insane asylum, who had developed a society and culture that worked for them, but confused the visitors. This seemed naggingly familiar, and I knew I had read something like it. What I remembered was The Great Explosion, a 1962 novel by Eric Frank Russell that won a Prometheus award several years later, after the author was already dead. It had that sort of scenario, with a ship from the Terran empire revisiting several "lost" colonies that had been isolated for centuries. One colony was a former penal colony and had the sort of mob government and so forth that you might expect. Another was founded by naturists and nudists, and their descendants were so physically perfect and healthy that the Terran visitors felt quite inferior and embarrassed. The last, which took the greater part of the book, had been founded by political refugees, anarchists who called themselves "Gands" after Mahatma Gandhi. This would have been the insane asylum reference, as the visitors thought it must have originated with an insane asylum. There was an obviously functional and complex culture and economy, yet there was no government at all, no laws, and no crime. The Terrans couldn't grasp a world economy built on barter and social obligation, with no weapons and no police force, yet they were confronted with such a system and it obviously worked. The problem was, 1962 was too late for the time frame wanted. Then I discovered that the novel was in fact an expansion of a short story by the same author, published in 1951 in Astounding Science Fiction with the title "...And Then There Were None." I think this must be the story that was sought, but won't know for sure until a couple of days from now probably.
Temperature got up to 41F today, and Gary did get the stuck barn door open. He scraped away enough earth to prevent a recurrence, we hope. We'll find out soon enough. It's raining now and tonight's low temperature is supposed to be only 38F but tomorrow the temperature will drop from a morning high of 40F all the way to -2F for a night-time low. Rain in the morning will change to sleet and flurries and then to snow, with up to two inches accumulation. That isn't too bad, since most of what we had on the ground melted or sublimed away today. However, that frigid low isn't so great. The heating technician will be back tomorrow morning, but I give no better than 50-50 odds that he'll fix the problem. Fortunately, we have plenty of firewood.
