Telephone Reference: A Free and Priceless Service

Several years ago, the New York Times ran a story about the New York Public Library's telephone reference service. Titled "Library Phone Answerers Survive the Internet," the piece chronicled the continued relevance of NYPL's team of ten who staff the telref desk. Here at the Tennessee State Library and Archives, we offer a similar service, although our calls are not limited to five minutes, and we are usually happy to call patrons back after checking printed sources. We have one professional librarian dedicated to the telephone reference desk each weekday from 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

One of the issues discussed in the Times article is that the general public does not have access to, or does not have the knowledge of, many online resources:

"There are "dark areas" on the Internet, Mr. Duguid [adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley] said, vast databases that are not scanned by search engines like Google...'If you have a good search question, Google is great for answering it,' Mr. Duguid said. 'If you don't have a good question, you will get 17 million responses and you will wish you hadn't asked.' "

This issue arose twice this morning as I manned the telephone reference desk here at TSLA. My first call was from a patron searching for her daughter's 1956 death certificate. Unable to visit Nashville to print off the record, and perhaps unable to provide the necessary $20.00 research fee, I was able to direct her to the Shelby County Register of Deeds website. This excellent site contains several state-wide indexes to Tennessee vital records. Even more exciting, the site includes digitized images of many original Shelby County documents. The patron's daughter's death certificate was one of these. I was able to email the patron a link to the website; I also sent her a pdf attachment of her daughter's death certificate. This service was completely free of charge.

My next call came from a patron wishing to lease retail space in Sumner County. She knew the address of the property she had in mind, but needed the name and contact information of the owner. Using the State of Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury's Real Estate Assessment Data website, I provided the requested information, satisfying another patron with a timely and accurate answer.

Neither of these individuals were aware of the deep resources available online, although anyone with an Internet hookup could access this information. Best of all, our services are free--or, perhaps, prepaid, since all Tennessee residents support our service with their tax dollars.

Telephone reference at the Tennessee State Library and Archives can be reached at 615.741.2764.