Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Hello! It's summer, and things are a little slower at the desk, but we still have summer classes to keep us going. Here's the latest list of questions from the Moffitt Reference Desk and the Environmental Design Reference Desk:
  • I'm looking for information on women and melodrama, to support my thesis casting women in the role of "progress," and men in the role of "regression" in these kinds of works.
  • I'm looking for information on how family structures and values have changed in the middle- to late twentieth century, and on how sociologists' readings of utopian works of the period might have influenced their view of these changes. (Discussed focusing topic, searched in Soc Abs for articles on changing family, + books in Melvyl.)
  • How do I cite polls in Turabian style? (Referred to Chicago Manual.)
  • I'm looking for information about Clarence Mayhew, an architect who designed the Alumni House on the Berkeley campus. (Nothing in Avery or Melvyl apart from a few items the patron already had. Went to broader books, histories of UCB campus.)
  • I'm looking for information on SunValley in Concord, CA--the biggest shopping center in the USA when it was built. (Newspapers in Concord area. Magazine article search did no good.)
  • I'm looking for more information about the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, OR. (Melvyl, Avery Index.)
  • I'm looking for contemporary reviews of the 1964 performance of James Baldwin's play, Blues For Mr. Charlie. (Historical NY Times, JSTOR.)
  • I'm looking for articles about male-male and female-female friendship on television shows, especially Entourage and The L Word.
  • How do I export content from CLCLT (Brepolis Classics database) in a usable format? The database only wants to let me export Latin texts one page at a time, or a few sentences at a time.
  • I'm looking for primary sources, preferably books, on and by Muslims living in London. (Tough search; student wanted memoir/personal history if possible. Tried Amazon as well as catalogs. Ended up providing secondary sources on Muslims in Great Britain, hoping citations from those would help. Also interested in responses to 7/7 bombings, other London terrorist attacks--found sources on these.)
  • I'm looking for information about the South Korean broadcast media--radio and television. I need specific statistics about the industry, as well as an overall discussion of the industry, its direction, future, etc.
  • I need to find literary criticism on Waiting for Godot.
  • I'm trying to find out about my house in Palo Alto. We suspect it was designed by an architect, but aren't sure. The Palo Alto Historical Society gave us a couple of possible names of architects, and we're wondering if we can find a comprehensive list of those people's work, to check to see if our house is on it.
  • Where can I find books about teaching English in different countries of the world?
  • How do I photocopy the first page of this book?

As always, if you have a better way of answering a question than I did, please let me know.