24-Hour Reference People

Reference help from the Seattle Public Library is going 24/7/365.25:

The Seattle Public Library now has live online reference services around the clock. For anyone up after midnight cramming for a test, stuck at home and unable to get to a library branch or even on vacation with a laptop, the library is available.

All that's needed is to go to www.spl.org, select "Ask a Librarian" and choose "Chat with a Librarian." The service is available every day, including holidays. No downloading software is required, and patrons need not have a library card to use the service.

This is probably great news for Christopher Frizzelle. We've had good luck with the library's chat service before, when it ran 8/6 instead of 24/7, successfully ascertaining that yes, Texas displaced Missouri as the largest state in the union (by land area, Michigan boosters!) when it joined. We also love the phone service, which apparently needs to end when the librarians go home.

The one SPL reference approach that's proved disappointing is the online form. We recently asked for info about the origin of people saying Stephen King was so popular he could publish his grocery list, and got this response:

As you suspected, it is very difficult to nail this phrase down. Many different people have said it of other people. King even said it about himself in a book he wrote called "On Writing". We were not able to find out who said it first. We have the book in our collection if you would like to check it out. It seems to be a well written book that is a good read as well as helpful.

We ended up asking the American Dialect Society, who managed to track King's connection to the phrase to his earlier book Different Seasons (which is, incidentally, probably where we saw it) and other variations (i.e. laundry list) about other authors back a decade or so from that. Sometimes you need to break out the big guns.

Anyone else love or hate the SPL's reference desk? Dish!