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The Department of Everything – Dispatches from the telephone reference desk
A world that has tossed out the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.
Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. Even without my nostalgia for certain antiquated and specialized reference books ( Kane’s Famous First Facts, the Encyclopedia of Associations, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable), I do think certain advantages accrued to analog ways of gathering information. Yes, it might have been nice to work in such an institution, but I had spent the previous two years cataloging learned periodicals at the New York Public Library on Forty-Second Street, and my colleagues at the reference desk in the august reading room on the third floor told me that at least half of their questions had to do with the location of the nearest bathroom.
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