Reference Librarian or P.I.? You decide.
Last semester I needed resources for a paper on the Los Angeles Central Library fire of 1986. The paper was for a class in Preservation. I found my topic innocently enough via a Google search about library disasters.
Floods abounded in my initial search for a disaster to write about, but I wanted something different. When I saw the word “fire” I thought, “Aha!” and committed to the topic without doing too much searching to see exactly what resources were out there. I figured, it’s an unusual event in a library in a major U.S. city. How difficult could it be to find stuff on this?
Oh. Was I wrong.
I won’t take you through the painful details of my search. Suffice to say that ultimately, a search on Ebsco delivered some interesting newsletter and lecture-driven articles by a fellow named Randall Butler. I now know that Dr. Butler, at the time of the fire, was working as the Archivist at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. He was on the scene within 12 hours of the site being opened for cleanup, and had a first-hand experience of the aftermath and devastation.
I Googled Dr. Butler and the fire and found some PDFs of a couple of his articles. I also discovered that there was out there, somewhere, shining like the holy grail of research, a 32 page pamphlet he wrote titled, The Los Angeles Central Library Fire: A Review and Analysis of a Disaster. The only library I could find with a copy of this pamphlet, however, was the Toronto Public Library in Canada.
The people manning the online reference chat in the library were helpful, and ultimately I was able to obtain a photocopy of the pamphlet by tracking down Dr. Butler through serendipitous phone calls that put me in touch with one of his former colleagues who knew where he was now working. Dr. Butler emailed his permission for a friend of a friend of mine to copy the pamphlet and fax it to me. It took me over two weeks and up until four days before my paper was due to get my hands on this detailed gem.
If the folks in Canada had not retained Dr. Butler’s pamphlet, apparently not even he could have given it to me. He no longer had a copy in any format, and the folks at the Los Angeles Public Library do not have one in their archives about the fire. Which reminds me, he asked me to email him a copy!
Let this be a lesson that while with technology many things are possible, contrary to popular opinion not everything is available online or in electronic format. You never know when good research will involve old fashioned gumshoe techniques. Call me Sam Spade, but isn’t that part of the fun?