Reference Questions

Monday was a good day for reference questions. The first involved determining the copyright status of "Home on the range." I always thought it was a traditional cowboy song, but it actually has a lyricist and a composer, who co-wrote it in the 1890's. It is also now the state song of Kansas. I told the man I suspected it was out of copyright, which now falls on 1923, but the best place to ask might be a law library.

This question stuck out in my mind because it is one of those that asking followup questions to seems kind of silly. It seems like a lot of questions in the music library are of this type, relating to the possession of by someone, a piece of music, etc.

The second question that stuck out in my mind involved finding materials on the history of cabarets in France and Germany. I began to ask "is there anything in particular you need to know about the history of cabarets in France and Germany?" but thankfully I stopped myself. The only real thing that needed definition was the kinds of materials the student needed, so I asked about that instead. At a public library, I probably would have asked my first question, but because of the setting, I didn't. The resulting session involved some keyword and subject searching in Chinook, and the same sorts of things in RILM, along with some other databases and GoldRush. On the whole it was a successful interview.

All in all, I think that these two questions are illustrative of the very directed questions you get in a specialized library.