A Reference Desk Beats Any Tool You Own

There are people whose entire profession is finding things, and they will help you for nothing.

The most underused resource in the whole business of finding out is a human being who does it professionally. Librarians and archivists spend careers learning the shape of collections: what exists, where it sits, what it is called, which index covers which years, which apparently promising source is a dead end and why. That knowledge is not written down anywhere you can search, because it is precisely the knowledge of how things are arranged, and no general tool contains it. Ask a good one a hard question and the answer arrives in minutes, along with two better questions you had not thought to ask.

People hesitate for reasons that do not survive examination. They think the question is too trivial, or too odd, or that asking is an imposition. It is not an imposition, it is the job, and the odd questions are usually the interesting part of the day. What helps is arriving with the question well formed: what you want to establish, why, what you have already tried, and what would count as an answer. That is the same discipline the first section of this magazine recommends, which is not a coincidence.

The general lesson extends beyond the reference desk. For any subject there is a category of person who knows where the documentation lives: the association that covers the trade, the society that keeps the historical material, the office that administers the scheme, the enquiries line of the body that made the rule. Asking such a person where to look, rather than asking them to answer the question, is a request that is easy to grant and startlingly effective. Finding out is often a social skill wearing a technical costume.