A few of the questions Mary Goulding faces on an average day:
Is the meat on a chicken wing considered light or dark? And how many pay phones are there at O`Hare International Airport?
As the director of reference services for the Suburban Library System
(SLS), such questions are rather commonplace for Goulding and her staff of seven full-time reference librarians, who work out of the basement of the Oak Lawn Public Library.
”Our main goal is to give the patron whatever information they need,”
said Goulding. ”Our secondary goal is to provide educational materials for reference staffs at all suburban libraries in the Chicago area.”
Goulding said that the SLS has been providing such a reference service since the late 1960s but has greatly expanded in the last decade.
”Reference work is no longer just a matter of going to the Reader`s Guide to Periodical Literature, to an encyclopedia or the card catalog,” she said. ”And often, when people go to a card catalog, they don`t know what to look for. We`re here to help them with their research work so they can instead spend time reading the materials and culling things from it. We`re the information experts.”
The questions Goulding and staff receive, needless to say, run the gamut. ”Most of our questions come from patrons and are geared toward school or their jobs,” she said. ”A few of the questions are from just plain curious people, many who might be playing `Trivial Pursuit.` For example, one person wanted to know how many pay phones there were at O`Hare. By talking to an equipment person there, we found out that the number was around 1,700.”
To track down the answers, Goulding and staff tap into a wealth of resources.
”We answer almost 30 percent of our questions talking with experts via long distance telephone calls,” she said. ”We also access our books, source files and other printed materials. And we do a lot of online database searching and have access to 800 different databases specializing in almost every discipline.”
Despite a strong success rate, sometimes Goulding and her staff are stumped. ”Someone wanted to know whether the wing meat on chicken is considered light or dark,” recalled Goulding. ”Despite talking to many people in the poultry industry, no one seemed to agree about that.”
Other times, there are requests for information that`s proprietary or top secret. ”One guy wanted to know how to program a Cash Station-type machine through a phone system,” said Goulding. ”Well, even we`re not going to be able to find out that type of information.”
