This time of year brings many students back to the library who have been absent all summer long.  We get our fair share of college students, high school students and graduate students as well.

Last night a young man came up to the counter to see if we had a text book he needed for one of his law classes. He said he was trying to avoid purchasisng the book.  I don't know if he was a law student, a paralegal student or what. Sadly, we did not have the book he needed.

The question is did I answer his question? Technically I did. Could the transaction end there? Technically yes. If I had ended it with the statement..."I'm sorry but we usually don't carry textbooks, and this is one we do not have" could I have done my hatch mark saying I had answered a reference question.  Well....I say no.

This young man needed the book, and I knew how to find it for him.  That is the real reference interview and process.  Librarians are called upon to find many different things, and we have so many more tools available to us now than in the past  Often I hear librarians say that they no longer answer reference questions, and they are basically internet clerks. The internet and the computer have become the new reference question. I didn't stop with our catalog, I didn't even stop with World Cat...libraries in California had this textbook but not the right edition. I showed this guy how to get into walmart.com and amazon.com and search for the title and how to buy it. What I was able to reaffirm for him is that we had exhausted all of our possibilities and now he could feel confident that the only way he was going to get this book was to buy it.

Before he left the counter, he shook my hand and told me how much he appreciated my help. I then put my hatch mark down for answering a reference question.