#titlequest — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #titlequest, aggregated by home.social.
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The Crack Squad of #Librarians Who Track Down Half-Forgotten Books
Reuniting stumped readers with the books from the edges of their memories.
by Jessica Leigh Hester, published August 2018
Excerpt: "A few years ago, staffers in the New York #PublicLibrary’s reader services division drafted a blog post about how to track down a book when its title eludes you. This post spurred a follow-up, in which reader services librarian Gwen Glazer recommended library resources and a number of other strategies (among them are Goodreads groups, a sprawling Reddit thread called whatsthatbook, an indie bookseller in Ohio who is happy to poke around for a $4 fee). Thanks to Google—“how to find a book”—many stumped people seem to land on that post, and they have often written about their enduring puzzles in the comments section. The messages now number in the thousands. Glazer says she often arrives at work to see another 10 title requests.
"To solve these little mysteries, Glazer assembled a team of sleuths from across the branches: Chatham Square, in Chinatown; the Jefferson Market, in Greenwich Village; the Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, near the Flatiron Building; and the Mulberry Street branch, in Nolita. At lunchtime on a Wednesday in 2018, they were gathered in that computer lab in the library’s offices—across the street from the soaring, spectacular Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (the Main Branch)—to nibble on homemade lemon rosemary cookies and apple, carrot, zucchini bread while they clattered away on their keyboards. Other members of the team participated remotely. The '#TitleQuest' #hackathon was underway."