A Reference Question Answered

I know this has almost nothing to do with copyright law (except for the fact that I had to log into UW from off-campus in order to access campus resources), but I had a friend ask me to find an article for her tonight. It was an example of a known-item search, because she and I both knew what an image looked like on the cover of the article and she remembered what journal it was found in. I thought I remembered a general time frame in which it was published, which was actually misleading for a while.

So, this is going to be a little funny, but this was a chemistry article in which the cover figure looks like a penis inserting into a vagina. Ridiculous, but it's the closest the chemistry world comes to something "viral" (disregarding the biological sense of virus, of course). Well, I began my search by logging into the American Chemical Society (ACS) database, which covers all of its proprietary titles, which are most of those that are important to chemistry. I started with a few keywords, such as "insertion" (a very popular term in chemistry, believe it or not, but it has more to do with inserting an atom into a bond and less to do with the "insertion" that the image looks like). When I realized that I had nearly 6000 hits to sort through, I limited my timeframe to August 2008-November 2008, because I knew that I first saw the article somewhere in that time frame (my first semester in the inorganic chemistry department at UW). When still too many hits remained, I limited myself to the journal Inorganic Chemistry, which is the journal in which my friend told me it was published. I looked through about 60 citations and didn't see the image, so I went back and refined my search. I had found an image of a key going into a lock on one article, which seemed quite similar to the image I was looking for, so I tried using the "find articles similar to this" link. No luck at all, seeing as I again had almost 6000 articles, but I did see the word "click" in the title. "Click chemistry" sounded about like what I was looking for, so I tried a new search similar to the last one, but this time leaving out the time frame because there were only about 60 articles total published in Inorganic Chemistry that use the word "click". Again, no luck.

At that point, I started wondering if maybe she had the journal title wrong. I glanced through the journal titles that ACS covers, and there was one journal that I'm very familiar with that didn't show up in the list, Angewandte Chemie (pronounced ahng-guh-von-tuh ki-mee), but that covers very similar topics to Inorganic Chemistry. Unfortunately, the search feature on Angewandte doesn't show images with their results, so I started flipping through the issues from Fall 2008, but to no avail.

At this point I moved to a regular search engine, both the images and the regular search through Google. I searched for things like "ridiculous chemistry images", incorporating "penis"*, "scorpion", and "llama" into my searches at various times, because I've seen journal figures that superimpose a molecule onto an image of a scorpion and another onto a llama, so I thought maybe someone would blog about the suggestive and/or stupid images that they've found. No such luck.
*Note to the user: I do NOT recommend conducting this search yourself. Some of the images that you will find are quite disturbing.

Return to Inorganic Chemistry. I decided to try a completely new approach, short of flipping through individual issues like I did with Angewandte. It was at this point that I noticed a link for "most popular articles" by month and by 12-month. I thought this might let me look back to 2008, because I knew that article was extremely popular then, having been shown to me both by my classmates here at UW and by friends who were still at my undergrad. Unfortunately, I was wrong about the ability to look at previous years' most popular articles, but I flipped through this year's most popular articles anyway. And, suddenly, there was my image! I found the article I was looking for because, even six years later, this image of a molecule-penis inserting into a molecule-vagina remains a highly-accessed article. I successfully used a variety of search techniques, progressively eliminating search terms and limitations in order to broaden my search, and ultimately found the item I was looking for, even if it was by a roundabout route that didn't actually use my search terms at all. Persistence pays off again! (I spent about an hour conducting this search, but it was well worth it in order to flex my reference muscles.)

And now, the image:







{trans-1,4-Bis[(4-pyridyl)ethenyl]benzene}(2,2‘-bipyridine)ruthenium(II) Complexes and Their Supramolecular Assemblies with β-Cyclodextrin

Sergio H. Toma, Miriam Uemi, Sofia Nikolaou, Daniela M. Tomazela, Marcos N. Eberlin, and Henrique E. Toma

Inorg. Chem., 2004, 43 (11), pp 3521–3527

DOI: 10.1021/ic0352250

Reference Services

First of all, I want to say that I was a bit surprised by the topics of the readings this week. I had originally thought that the week's focus would be on collection development for two reason: one, we were told in the first week of class that we would cover collection development the week after we did our collection development exercise, and two, with Cat Smith as the guest lecturer, I naturally assumed that she would talk about collection development, since she teaches that class. I could see the connection in that Cat also teaches 451, but I really don't feel like I have closure on my collection development exercise.

With that being said, I suppose I have to talk about reference services (user-centered services), as that's what the readings focused on. I'm mostly going to ignore the Enola Gay article, because it was largely disconnected from the other articles that we read this week. The one correlation I can draw between it and libraries is the desire for censorship by some of the public, and the long-standing tradition of librarians to preserve freedom of speech. Librarians would most certainly want to display the Enola Gay, because it's information, but I'm not sure how they would feel about the "speech" that was written to go along with the display.

Anyway, reference services. I mostly want to focus on Morris's article, because there was a section the "Reference Interview" that stood out to me. First of all, from 451 last year, I remember reading an article in one of the first weeks of class entitled "The Myth of the Reference Interview". I had no idea what a reference interview was at the time, but I quickly discovered that there is a long-standing tradition in libraries of trying to teach about the "reference interview", a scripted, often very long, interview that the reference librarian conducts before trying to find the information that the patron wanted. In short, the interview is highly inappropriate for most reference interactions and is rarely used in practice. At one point, there was some reasoning behind the reference interview, such as when you're trying to find high-level references, such as when someone is trying to write his or her dissertation (still a valid use of the reference interview today), or the fact that the cost of searching was exceedingly high. Reference librarians would narrow down the searcher's topic as much as possible, so that they were querying the database as few times as possible, thus saving the library's time and money. Nowadays, however, database searching is much cheaper, and is rarely limited by either amount downloaded or time spent using the database, effectively eliminating the argument of cost from the equation (ignoring the cost of employing the reference librarian). Second, the reference interview is really only useful for in-depth queries. Typically the patron is either going to ask a simple question ("ready-reference", as it was called once upon a time, such as a state capital or some other factoid-type question) or ask for general information on a topic. Most reference questions, from what I've been told, are for school projects or for medical topics, which generally means that these questions do not go nearly as in-depth as the reference interview would require the librarian to go.

So how does all of this tie into user-centered services? Quite simply: users don't want to spend an hour with the reference librarian, going through a formal reference interview, just to get information for a 500-word school paper or to find out the capital of Arizona. A user-centered service would only involve asking the patrons enough questions to find out what they want to know, and also guiding the choice of subsequent questions by the patron's responses, rather than following a scripted interview. User-centered: gauge what your patron wants. Most likely, it doesn't involve a long, drawn-out reference interview.