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Logical End

Wonderful essay about how information was gathered and shared in the 1980s. Having such access to information would be completely magical for me back in that time. My local library was small and limited and yet offered me access to the world for which I was grateful. 

From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls. And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing.

I would be in the idly curious category like a lot of kids. When there is no way to indulge the curiosity, the spark can die out - and I am sure it did with me. But conversely, has having infinite access to all the information in the world made modern kids pursue idle curiosity to any logical, useful end ? The value of knowing things has been diminished by ease of access and there are so many shiny objects for the idly curious to pursue that they don't have the desire to stay the course with any particular question.

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