Saturday, March 26, 2011

Maybe look at a book?

Some days things are just a bit different, and often there seems to be a bit of a pattern to it. Today was "Use the Internet even if a print source would work better" Day. I happened to answer the phone this morning, and was talking with a woman who needed information on cooking sausage. This almost seemed to be a Reference Desk question, but since I wasn't busy or at a public desk, I figured I'd handle it. She couldn't get to the library and didn't have internet so wanted me to look up instructions. "What do they say about cooking sausage?" she asked, as if the internet was a specific entity I could ask. So we did a little reference interview: what kind of sausage? Links or patties? Beef was the reply. Her phone connection wasn't the best, either, so I was only getting 75% of the conversation. I started with allrecipes.com but only got recipes including sausage (and some sounded great!) but this was beyond what she was looking for. So back to Google and "sausage cooking instructions" which got me more specific information. I read the various methods (which, thankfully, corresponded to what I had already told her off the top of my head). She hung up after a bit, so I have to assume she got what she needed. But I wondered if there wasn't a cookbook around somewhere?

A co-worker had the phone call asking for "phone numbers of all bookstores in Bozeman." That's a case where a phone book would be more efficient, and that's what we'd use to answer the question. It's hard to know the actual reason for this so maybe the phone book wouldn't be the best source, but I always wonder. People often think the internet is the ultimate source when it's really just one of many.

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