Customer Reviews

Stumpers!: Answers to Hundreds of Questions that Stumped the Experts

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As one of the people quoted in _Stumpers_, I want to tweak your "book description" a bit. When reference librarians are stumped, we go to *other reference librarians.* Though the questions Fred has chosen are the wildest and wooliest in the Stumpers archives, they're not exactly "questions even the professionals couldn't handle." They are questions that one particular professional, who may be in a very small or very specialized library -- or whose books are packed up for a move -- couldn't find on that particular day, and forwarded to the World's Biggest Virtual Reference Desk.

That said, we do tend to get some truly gnarly stumpers. (My favorite is the carefully handwritten note one librarian received asking for the name of a song that goes "dah-dee-dah-dee-dum-de-dee-dah...") It's amazing how often the impossible ones do get answered.

The point of the Stumpers-L discussion group is that if enough of us participate, *one* at least is sure to have the answer. In the several years I've been a member, we've had contributions from subject experts in an amazing range of specialities, people you couldn't afford to hire as consultants even if you knew they existed. (The book's full of wonderful examples.)

The great thing is the spirit of collegiality among this huge diverse group of people, most of whom never meet in real life, who may have nothing in common except an addiction to finding things out. Reading the book will give you a stash of deliriously odd facts to reel out at parties, but it will also teach you something about the nature of information and the meaning of "answers."

It's interesting to look at Stumpers, as the one who started the whole thing, way back in 1992, when I was a Library Science student thinking, "You know, there's an interesting new way we could use this Internet thing..."

That was way back in the days when the web was mostly compiled of gophers and ftp sites, and Lynx was pretty high-tech. It's all grown a lot since then--the Internet, Stumpers, and the network of librarians on the Internet and on Stumpers.

This collection is a tribute to the resourcefulness and mutual helpfulness of librarians, as well as a great read. Librarians are far from mouse-haired whisperers of "Shhh," hiding behind their card catalogs--they're the ones who are making revolutionary use of revolutionary technologies!