Navigate The Dark Areas Of The Internet The Old Fashioned Way — Via The New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service

Most things you can Google. For everything else, there’s the New York Public Library Telephone Reference Service:

. . . [T]he persistence of this service raises its own questions. Like why, in the age of search engines, would anyone bedevil a human being with such questions? And what human being would choose to be so bedeviled?

Harriet Shalat, 62, of Forest Hills, Queens, for one. She is the chief of the service, known as telref. “We are detectives,” she said. “We know more than people think we know. We’re not little old ladies stamping books and telling you to be quiet.”

Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, said there would always be a place for such human search engines.

There are “dark areas” on the Internet, Mr. Duguid said, vast databases that are not scanned by search engines like Google. Mr. Duguid (pronounced do-good) is a co-author of “The Social Life of Information” (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), about data that computers cannot process.

“If you have a good search question, Google is great for answering it,” Mr. Duguid said. “If you don’t have a good question, you will get 17 million responses and you will wish you hadn’t asked.”

Some caller questions are verboten. The telref staff won’t answer crossword or contest questions, do children’s homework, or answer philosophical speculations or guilty-spouse questions (what is my wife’s birthday?).

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When a challenging question comes in, the staff quivers, like human parallel processors, checking reference books and pooling information. They can also consult with as many as 50 other researchers in the library system.

Under library rules, each inquiry must be answered in under five minutes, meaning the caller gets an answer or somewhere to go for an answer — like a specialty library, trade group or Web site. Researchers cannot call back questioners.

The deadline is meant, in part, to focus the staffer’s attention. “Otherwise,” Ms. Shalat said, “once we get going, we would never stop.”

Almost all telephone calls are in English, although researchers can get by in Chinese, Spanish, German and some Yiddish. Specialty libraries, like the Slavic and Baltic division, can lend a hand with, say, Albanian.

The haughty and the impatient tend to be men, Ms. Shalat said. Physicians are the worst. “It’s not a man thing, it’s a conceit thing,” Ms. Shalat said. “This is Doctor So-and-So calling and I need blah blah blah. Run and get it, honey.”

A person might ask, “Tell me about Africa,” Ms. Shalat said. A few quick questions will elicit her real interest in animals, then in elephants, and finally the reproductive cycles of elephants. “Now that’s a question we can answer,” Ms. Shalat said.