Real reference

I entered librarianship in the Google era, and I know I don't have the search chops of librarians who were doing this job when search engines weren't around to make things easier for the end user and the lazy/ignorant librarian. If I were to take a job in, say, the library of a graduate school, or a genealogy/local history collection, I know it would be a steep learning curve for me on the reference desk. I would not be very good at it when I started.

However, because of the availability of search engines and because of the kinds of libraries where I've mostly worked, I rarely get a reference question that challenges my limited skills. When someone comes in with real challenge, I experience 50% excitement, 50% fear that I'll need to slink into the back and get my Baby Boomer colleague, who started her career in The Good Old Days When Librarians Knew Things and There Wasn't All This Technology (seriously, she can find materials on any search topic, but somehow can't handle making edits to our shared Google Doc of collection development ideas?).

Anyway, one of our regular patrons is doing some kind of online college or advanced degree. He had to do what was basically a book report, and the book he did his report on was A Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel. It's a semi-popular history book about a free black woman who was abducted, sold into slavery, got free after the Civil War, and successfully sued her abductor for damages. It looks super-fascinating and like a great choice for a homework assignment. The problem was that he had an opportunity for extra credit, which apparently he needed, and the extra credit assignment seemed to assume that people had chosen books by older, more famous authors, because the first question was: What is the date of birth and place of birth of the author of your book?

W. Caleb McDaniel is a professor in the Rice University History Department, and is actually kind of famous as associate history professors go, which is...not all that famous. He's famous enough that a Google search brings up information about him for most of the first page results, but not like, famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page (not even a stub). History Guy (I'm calling this regular History Guy now since I don't know his real name) got a pretty good start on his own--he read Professor McDaniel's CV, found out where he went to college and what year he graduated, and was looking through digitized college yearbooks, trying to find the guy and see if his birthday was mentioned. Unfortunately, he wasn't having any luck, so he came up to the desk to ask for help.

I thought I'd post how I found it for other 'new' librarians like me, who might be impressed (I'm definitely not telling Baby Boomer colleague, though--it wasn't THAT good). It's also a nice little lesson on how horrifyingly easy it is to find out people's personal information.

Birthday:
I recognized the book and knew that my library owned it. I know that the records in our catalog include the author's year of birth, which I figured was a good starting point. I pulled it up in our catalog and looked at the MARC record, which looked kind of like this:
 
 Do I know what any of those field codes mean? No. Can I extract any meaning at all from 90% of the lines? No. BUT, like 100 does include the author's full first name and his birth year, as I recalled. I also noticed that it was followed by a link that included "loc.gov": http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n2012048275.html. I didn't know exactly what that link was, but I recognized it as a Library of Congress link and figured that it was some kind of further information on the author. It is in fact the Library of Congress Name Authority File for McDaniel, which a) made me want to go back to school and take like 10 database classes, and b) contained McDaniel's full date of birth:




 Ta da!

Place of birth:
I was now armed with McDaniel's full first name, birthdate, and also the fact that he was described as a "Native Texan" in a couple of book talk/book signing blurbs about him on different bookstore websites. My library subscribes to Ancestry.com's Library Edition, which is supposed to be for genealogy but which has a lot of records about living people. I went into Ancestry and found that it had something called 'Texas, Birth Index, 1903-1997). A William C. McDaniel was born on August 2, 1979 in San Patricio County. How many can there be? I hope History Guy's professor was happy with the county and didn't demand the city instead.