ABSTRACT
It is 12:30 p.m. at the Reference Desk. The mid-semester library assignments are due and the students are getting serious about writing research papers. An inventor, totally unfamiliar with libraries, wants to find patents; a telephone patron needs to know schools offering home study courses in nursing; a student wants the figure on the total number of people who have lived on earth; a political science student is having trouble finding a government document; someone else asks for an explanation on how to use the Social Science Citation Index. None of these are unreasonable requests, but all come within a fifteen-minute period! To top it all off, an unattended child pulls too many drawers from a cabinet which then falls on him. You reach for the reference librarian’s “crisis line”, but no one is answering. Colleagues are either in committee meetings or attending to other duties. The secretary is at lunch. There is no money in the budget for student assistant backup. You must handle these requests solo!
