Scavenger hunt and searching for a page

Professors are interesting creatures to deal with. If you do not work in academia, please read "The Edge Chronicles" to see what academics can be like with the professors of Sanctaphrax.

My second year working in serials (I work at my alma mater BA '96, MS-ITM '04), one of my former professors sent a non-English speaking student over to my office with a copied page from a journal. All that was on the copied page was part of a first paragraph. At the bottom of the page was part of the title of the serial, but no year or any other information. From what I could gather from the student, his assignment was to find the whole article and copy it.


I took the student to where we had the print serial and tried to convey to him that he now had 12 years of that serial to look through if he wanted to find it. And, of course, this was a serial that started numbering over with each issue. This meant that he would have had to go through 48 issues and look at each page number "45" to try and come across it. Well, the student did not speak enough English for this point to sink in and he kept looking at me blankly.


I took him down to the reference department and explained the problem. Fortunately, they were able to pull enough key words out of the paragraph and find the citation in a database. Whereupon he came back to me and I copied the article for the student to take to the professor.


An amusing p.s. to this story is that the professor had written the article originally. He was glad that we could help provide him with another copy of his article and the correct citation, because he wanted to reference it in another article he was writing!