Where should things go?Ann Folsom wrote in asking how to find a good (best?) place for your collection of possibly historically useful artifacts. I condensed her questions in these two: 1. How do you find the “best” place for your collection of art…
Where should things go? Regular Reader Ann Folsom wrote in with a great question that I wanted to share as a SearchResearch Challenge, especially at this holiday time of the year. Her excellent question: Some of us are in the position of downsizing o…
Is this story for real? We’ve even talked before about how hard this task is. Perhaps this is why people keep coming to librarians and asking these questions. They really want to find that story again, and they can’t figure out how to do it. But we’…
Life sometimes intervenes. Sigh. This week’s answer is a bit delayed because I’m living with a bit of sinusitis, which is basically an infection of the sinuses (which has the side-effect of making it tough to think through the writing process). Natur…
One of the most common things a librarian gets asked… … is a question of the form: “Can you find this story (that I barely remember) for me?” We’ve even talked before about how hard this task is. Perhaps this is why people keep coming to librari…
Mercury is magical, but it leaves a legacy… Apparently I wasn’t the only kid to play with liquid metal mercury. Many folks about my age (including the ageless RegularReader JonTheUnknown) have spent time pouring mercury back and forth between our ha…
Mercury is pure metal magic. When I was a kid, we used to occasionally play with small beads of mercury when one of the kids would break a thermometer. Nobody told us it was toxic, so we’d roll small beads of it back and forth in our hands, amazed at …
About those islands… Our Challenge this week was to find out about the Greek island of Delos and the reported appearance of a new-ish island near Santorini. Delos: Right in the middle of the Aegean.I had a couple of Challenge questions about Greek …
It’s Thanksgiving weekend in the US… … and one of the things I’m thankful for was the chance to travel to such interesting places this year. It really was a great year of wandering-about. Although we’ve already had one Challenge about the Mediter…
Language is important… … although sometimes you’ll hear people say dismissively “it’s just word” or “it’s all just semantics,” they’re missing the point. Words, and the specific meanings of words, really DO matter. One of the interesting phenomen…
We’ve just emerged… … from a long and difficult election season that was full of seemingly endless stream of articles about the candidates, their positions, where the culture is heading, and whether or not we should consider moving to Canada. One …
Sometimes SearchResearch Challenges are tough.. … then there are the ones that are delightfully straightforward, yet surprising. This week’s in in that category. Let’s take on each of the Challenges one at a time: 1. I found out, much to my sur…
Every so often, something goes very wrong… … and under certain circumstances, it not only can go wrong, but then keep the disaster going for years–and sometimes for centuries. This week, while reading something on a completely different topic, I …
This was an unusual Challenge. Remember that I asked: Can you find interesting and useful cases when a search includes an emoji or a special Unicode character? Say WHY you find this use case interesting. Here’s what I found as interesting search ca…
Maybe you’re wondering why this week’s post is so abysmally late…It probably won’t surprise you to find out that I’m traveling again. In fact, this is day 5 of a two week stretch of teaching and lecturing. I’m here, there, and everywhere giving cla…