Before there was Google

[flea]

I'm discarding the old "Brain Box" from the Reference Desk today. It hasn't been heavily used in a long time, but at once point it was a major resource. In the old days, before the internets, people used to come to library Reference Desks to ask questions about all kinds of things - what was the top-grossing film of 1956? Where can I find a list of companies manufacting cigarettes in Durham in 1888? What day of the week was Christmas Day in 1930? And the librarians answered them using books and Brain Boxes.

People don't often ask there questions at my library any more - public libraries still see a fair number of them I think, but our patron base is heavily computer-savvy. Even when we do get asked these questions, a simple Google search is usually sufficient to answer them.

Our Brain Box had 4 categories: University Information, City Information, Special Collections in Our Library, and General. It's a fount of the arcane, the interesting, the so very out-of-date. So it's going in the recycling bin. I hope no deceased former librarians come to haunt us - though we were unghosted when we discarded the card catalog, so we should be safe today, too.

Comments

[gchick.livejournal.com]

Brain Boxes and the like always make me think of Desk Set, Corfu, King Solomon's Mines, and the boop-boop-boop-BWOMP noise that EMERAC made whenever she worked, and which I still think my computer should make in some context or another.

[cindywrites.livejournal.com]

Love that movie!