What's on your Monday Menu?

"written a paper about cookies" - this reminds me of my years working in an undergraduate library, esp when dealing with first year students. I remember working the reference desk one afternoon when a new student asked me for help in finding scholarly articles on making ice cream, because she wasn't able to find any. ARRGGHH!! (although I suppose one could find such articles on how to modify the freezing point of ice cream - or something like that - but that's not what she had in mind). I used to hate getting questions late at night when the subject libraries were closed, when we'd get calls or chat messages from PhD students or med, pharmacy, or graduate engineering students or whatever asking for extremely esoteric information on some subject I had no clue about, but then again - freshmen. Oh the stories I could tell...

I wonder if google is replacing reference librarians in that fashion. Searching for "scholarly articles on ice cream" I found ones going back to the 80s...and now I know that there is a Journal of Dairy Science!

Those might be my people.

Yes there is!! (I know this because I'm pretty sure I've looked up articles in this (i.e., Journal of Dairy Science) - we're a landgrant university, though..)

Google will probably never totally replace reference librarians - esp in university libraries. A lot of scholarly articles are copyrighted. Although there are definitely more nowadays that are publicly available than they're used to be.

I should add, though, that's it's definitely replaced the types of questions we got at the reference desk (the ice cream one aside...). The questions now tend to be a lot tougher - because the students often only came to us after they'd spent a lot of time googling their topic - so simpler answers they were usually able to find on their own.

All of my degrees were online. There was definitely a lot of Google resear*****orporated from sources to supplement the horrible online reference system. It always took a bit more to ensure the sources were credible. I used to be flabbergasted at the content sources my team would attempt to cite in projects. Or the entire paragraphs of quoted text.

Having never experienced the on campus college experience, I would love all the stories! Even in high school for research papers, you didn't ask the librarian or staff about a specific topic. You just spent hours with your nose in reference books taking copious notes. Particularly vivid memories from work I had to do in debate, too!

Ice cream. Love it! You were very polite about it.

Take good care of yourself during this time.

Thank you. I'm trying! I'm grateful to not have to focus on work through this. :)

Good morning all. Today is Patriot's Day here, to commemorate the battles at Lexington and Concord. There is nonstop Boston Marathon coverage, and the Sox play the Angels at 10 am. Which means, back in California, the game is on at 7am. That's gotta be weird.

QOTD: Being indecisive, I would have a museum with all the things. It would be enormous. You could see it from space. There would be a giant photo showing the museum from space in the museum's lobby, with an arrow showing You Are Here.