Everything an author has written...

I had a graduate assistant come up to the desk today. Her professor requested of her two things: to get fresh print copies of 15 articles and to find every published work by those authors. He said that he wanted the latter information in case any students were interested in doing further research. When the GA told me that bit we shared a "huh" moment, after all, why can't the students doing further research find out the info? But I digress.

The reference transaction went pretty well. She brought in one of the articles and wanted me to show her how to do the research for the other fourteen. Her initiative made my heart sing! Anyway, I showed her the basics of finding and/or ordering full-text articles. That was easy.

We then discussed the various methods for compiling a complete list of an author's work. I have to admit my ignorance of any resource that clearly does this, so I went through the various places where she might piece a list together. I talked about finding and reviewing the author's CV, our library catalog and databases, as well as Amazon, etc.

I later talked to the head of reference services, and he suggested WorldCat as a starting point (metasearching!) and then the major bibliographies for the real big names. I don't feel too bad at not mentioning the last one, because many of the articles were not written by the big name authors. WorldCat, however, should have been obvious!

Anyway, overall, it was a pretty good interview. The GA went away ready and confident, which means a job well done to me.

Family Therapy

Back after a long transition to a new library...

Interesting reference question today. After hours of little to do (it's Saturday), a student walked up to the desk. The student's assignment required him to take a model of family therapy and apply it to a specific population. Because of his current experience volunteering in a local homeless shelter, he decided to focus on that population and the Structural Family Therapy model.

It was probably one of those rare reference experiences that goes really well. After using the catalog and databases with much success, we actually found our material in the stacks. The reference interview was so great that we even discussed the info synthesis process, specifically the need to pull and work with info from a variety of sources, because there were no items that really brought the two main concepts together.

We found books, book chapters, and articles, which were on a variety of formats. The guy was even open to using microfiche though he had never seen anything like it before. It would have been a great moment if the microfiche scanner had actually worked! At least I was able to promise him that we can scan it and send it to him in a couple days.

Fun times all around.