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New York's librarians: where the world turns when the answer's not on Google

For years, a small band of researchers at the New York Public Library has been tackling questions from young and old, the clueless and the haughty, reducing life's infinite jumble to an answer, more or less.

Today, despite the Internet, the eight women and two men of the telephone reference service are still at it. Every day, except Sundays and holidays, between 9am and 6pm, anyone, of any age, from anywhere can telephone (212) 340-0849 and ask almost any question.

What country had the first license plates? What is the life cycle of an eyebrow hair? What is arachibutyrophobia? How does a person get out of quicksand?

The staff has less than five minutes to reply. (Answers at the end of this article.)

Most queries are humdrum, like when is the library open. The clueless ask who the famous are, like who is the vice president. Secretaries puzzle over their own shorthand when the boss uses an unfamiliar word.

Some queries get garbled: One librarian thought a caller from South Africa was asking how many statues of Lenin there are in the world. He meant John Lennon, and was referred to other sources.

While the number of telephone calls has declined over the years to fewer than 150 a day from more than 1,000, they still made up two-thirds, or 41,715, of all inquiries to the staff last year (the rest were by computer).

Still, the persistence of this service raises its own questions. Why, in the age of search engines, would anyone bedevil a human being with such questions? And what human being would choose to be so bedeviled?

Harriet Shalat, 62, of Forest Hills, Queens, for one. She is the chief of the service, known as telref.

"We are detectives," she said. "We know more than people think we know. We're not little old ladies stamping books and telling you to be quiet."

Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, said there would always be a place for such human search engines.

There are "dark areas" on the Internet, vast databases that are not scanned by search engines like Google, said Duguid, a co-author of The Social Life of Information, about data that computers cannot process.

"If you have a good search question, Google is great for answering it," he said. "If you don't have a good question, you will get 17 million responses and you will wish you hadn't asked."

Some caller questions are verboten. The telref staff will not answer crossword or contest questions, do children's homework, or answer philosophical speculations or guilty-spouse questions (what is my wife's birthday?).

"And if a question is very funny," Shalat said, "you have to put the person on hold, before you start laughing."

(Answers: France, Aug. 14, 1893; 150 days; fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth; don't thrash, ease to the surface, float.)
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