It all started as a winter weekend trip to a Forest Service cabin nestled between Mt. Saint Helens and Mt. Adams. I was looking forward to no electricity, no cell phone service, no people, and carrying all of my food, water and bedding a half mile by snowshoe and sled into what remains of the forest primeval.
I know, only half of a mile? It wasn’t really a big deal and we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit, even after the underfunded local government towed our car from the sno-park.
I brought along with me an ambitious amount of reading material: books, zines, and two years worth of New Yorker articles I had clipped out of issues rescued from the recycling bin. But we got there and I didn’t get much of my reading done; the propane lamps in the cabin didn’t give off much light, my headlamp battery was dying and during the daytime, it wasn’t even that bright.
But the real shame is that I didn’t get to peruse the reading material that was already at the cabin:
Not to be thwarted by a guy with a towtruck, I was determined to read this book, and decided to check it see if the library had the it when I got home. I was lucky; we did, and it was in.
As I showed the book around to colleagues and friends, posing to them the title question, I got one of two responses: an emphatic Yes! or a giggle at the name of the author, Jeane Dixon, America’s Most Famous Psychic.
As I know now, in her day, Dixon well known for not really predicting the future and for having helmet hair.
She begins her book by telling stories of extraordinary cats, including that of Ringo, a tabby who saved his owners, Carol and Ray Steiner, from an explosive gas leak. Ringo was awarded the “Stillman Award for Bravery” by the American Humane Association. Since we shelved this book with a Dewey number, I knew this book was non-fiction, one of the books we tell children are “true”. I was skeptical, though, and here was a good chance to play Encyclopedia Brown.
If any site listed obscure awards, it would be in Wikipedia, but that failed. A few Google Searches yielded some clues - the Stillman award is more fully known as the William O. Stillman Award for Heroism, or sometimes Bravery. I found out that William O. Stillman was an early animal rights activist, and that the award had been given out either 10 or 143 times.
Numerous stories tell of cats and dogs saving humans from dearth and disaster, including an ancient website from a student at the University of Pittsburgh (~kloman), who hosted a list of newspaper clips from a friend’s stint at the Pittsburgh Bureau of the Associated Press, one Anthony Breznican.
Browsing the clips, I noticed that most of the stories seemed to fit into the News of the Weird category, with headlines like Town fights invasion of 7,000 pigs, Youths intentionally driving over animals, and Cat risks nine lives to save owner. Add a reference to Elvis, and the rest of the young author’s work also becomes implausible: Archaeologists find remains of tribe from last ice age, Rabbi promotes Hanukkah toy as art.
Then I uncovered a couple stories in reference to Ringo, Dixon’s human-saving gas sniffer. Your Cat magazine features the story on a promotional page offering stories from January, 2001, but copyrighted 2007. Another is hosted on a broadcast media site, but said the award came from the American Humane Society, and one from Google Books put Ringo’s feat in 1998, a year after Dixon’s book was published. Some stories put Ringo and his owners the Steiners in Bowling Green, Ohio, but the Your Cat site had them in Wood County, Massachusetts.
At this point, I decided to do what a growing number of Oregonians are doing: I visited my local statewide virtual reference service and asked the late-night librarian for help. I have a lot of respect and admiration for reference librarians, and I was hoping that one would have the secret ref-fu to come up with the right database or even print source to track down this award. But I had no such luck.
The next chance I got, I left a message for the most likely sounding person in the American Humane Association’s phone tree. Was the Stillman award real? Did the AHA have a list of winners? I gave myself even odds on whether they would call back or not, but I was pretty convinced that the Stillman award was a hoax. “Wood County Massachusetts” topped it all. It’s easy for me to believe that animals were capable of heroically saving human lives, but if you are going to make up stories about it, please make sure you reference places that actually exist.
What I found so fascinating was that the Stillman award wasn’t so much an elaborate hoax as an established one. I imagined that authors for Cat Fancy and Dog World had created the award long ago and have been giving it out occasionally ever since. Perhaps the early career of Breznican, now a reporter for USA Today, was tainted.
Meanwhile I remembered I might have some ref-fu of my own and found that we had a few reference books that might help. One reference book, World of Winners (2nd. edition, Gale, 1992) listed an award given by the American Humane Association for animals in film, but not the Stillman. Then
To recognize a humane act of rescuing animals at personal risk, or the rescue of human life by an animal by virtue of extreme intelligence in an emergency. Both individuals and animals are eligible. Gold, bronze, or silver medals, or plaques are awarded as merited. Established in 1900.
Now that I looked at them closely, even Google Books indicated credible results, even if I could only see the keywords in context.
And then an archivist from the American Humane Association called me back. She said yes, the award was real, it wasn’t given out very often, and they didn’t have any ready reference to what animals it had been given to or for what.
I’m struck by how my techniques for verifying truth on the internet led me to believe that the Stillman award was fake when it wasn’t. There were several conflicting accounts and dates. All of the stories about the Stillman Award were unbelievable in the same way, and I suppose this might have been what made them newsworthy. All of the book results in my Google search were from the same kind of book as Do Cats Have ESP? - books for cooky cat lovers. If I were teaching a 6th grader to be skeptical about information on the internet, the Stillman Award might be the kind of thing I would have them search for.
And I’m also struck by my own behavior and judgements. I only searched Google, and when I didn’t see a hit from Wikipedia, I went looking for one. I accepted Google’s Search results labeled as from books as representative of that collection without looking further there. I had no trouble dreaming that a journalist for USA Today would make up stories. Even though I am cat owner myself, I apparently harbor some kind of disdain for the cat-loving subculture, its publications, and bad web design.
In one last search, I found a few stories about the Stillman award by searching EBSCO’s MasterFile Premier database. A full-text offering from Dog World (”Heroic mixed-breed saves owner from fire”, Dog World; July 1998, Vol. 83 Issue 7, p151) included a section that might have come from an AHA press release:
AHA gave the first Stillman Award in 1900 to John Doerflinger, who was seriously injured while rescuing a dog trapped on the tracks of an elevated railroad in New York City. Since that time, 143 animals and 117 people have received the national award.
There was some truth to this story after all, and plausible explanations for all of it. The award exists, was established in 1900, and it is given out more often than the AHA knows. It’s more exciting for the media when pets get it than when humans do. Bowling Green, Ohio is the seat of Wood County. The wacky stories from the Associated Press writer were real, and he had a lot of fun making up headlines. Dreidels can indeed be art objects.
Ringo was real, too. The reason Jeane Dixon could have known about his story in 1997 when it was reported to have happened in 1998 was simple: in 1998, McCall’s magazine ran a story reporting Ringo had saved the Steiners in 1995 (Donna Boetig, “The cutest American heroes”, McCall’s, Feb.1998, Vol. 125 Issue 5, p64). Someone saw the story and used the date on the magazine instead of the one in the story. Perhaps some of the people writing about Ringo had their facts wrong, but Dixon didn’t.
I returned Do Cats Have ESP? to the library, satisfied.
The End?
“I’m struck by how my techniques for verifying truth on the internet led me to believe that the Stillman award was fake when it wasn’t.”
I think this *would* be a fantastic thing to have a group of sixth graders look at! At LOEX a couple of years ago - 2005 I think it was - I saw a presentation on evaluating information that I really liked. I kind of went to it by accident, but it stuck with me more than any other session at that conference. And the thing that the presenter said that stuck with me was that the information literacy skill/concept/knowledge that her students lacked was not the ability to find information, and was not the ability to evaluate the information they found - it was knowing when to stop.
She showed how the evaluation skills they’d learned taught them to find the reason why a piece of information was bad, and then once they found that out they had been taught or they had learned to give up on the ideas and the content in that information too. Sometimes that’s fine - sometimes when you do that you really miss out. Knowing when to stop - there’s so much thinking and understanding captured in that statement.
I probably would have stopped too early here. The piece of actually calling someone and talking to a person - that’s a block for me.
this is a terrific story! i’m totally impressed by your ref-fu actually. i always think one thing that keeps me from being a truly great reference librarian is my reluctance to pick up the phone, when that’s what it takes.
i wanted to add that this totally cracked me up because i read the L-Net transcripts in my RSS reader and had read that transaction a few days ago! when i first started reading your post i was thinking “this all seems really familiar…”
See, I feel terrible I picked up the phone before I even searched Google Books specifically. Lay-Z, beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think I was fascinated with this activity because we’re always cautioning people that Things On The Internet Might Not Be True, and even, Books Can Be Wrong, and here they both were, or so I thought, and even then there’s still a ton of misinformation about Ringo out there. I think I stopped when I could imagine a plausible explanation for that.
I did also look up the Steiners’ home telephone number, but decided against calling them. I probably stopped in the right place.
it’s clear that if you ever decide to give up the librarian racket you’d be an awesome journalist! How hilarious would it have been if you’d called the Steiners!?
i was also struck here that part of the issue was that you had what seemed like a pretty classic ready reference type question (and, indeed, once you matched it to the right source it pretty much was) so when you looked to Google, to Wikipedia and didn’t find anything about this known, named thing it rang alarm bells for you. I have this happen all the time at the reference desk. I’ll happily help students through complex questions all day long and then I get completely thrown for a loop when they come asking for something that seems so…look-up-able. I was talking to anne-marie about my performance anxiety around this particular issue once and she pointed out that we’re really not operating in the reference room of old, where there really were far fewer options in terms of matching a source to a question. “Back in the day” it was a lot easier and more automatic for a reference librarian to think “award? i’ll look in that Gale reference to awards, prizes, and honors”. These days ANYONE is going to think “i’ll Google it”. And, typically, we find something we can build on. When we find nothing, or find things that don’t advance our search, i think it can be hard for librarians of our…generation?…to take a step back. Or maybe i should just speak for myself when i say this. I guess, also, very experienced reference librarians have such an intimate knowledge of their collections that that sort of source matching is more automatic for them as well. Anyway…what was i saying?
I think it was Dave Lankes who pointed out to me that the library literature of reference has shifted from a discussion of sources to a discussion of techniques for delivering reference service. Not to say that that there hasn’t been works on reference technique before, but it has come to dominate the literature since the 90s.
I’m certainly not someone who works from a knowledge of sources, even though I was taught reference that way. I get very little practice in reference that isn’t rush rush rush (!)
I think that it’s more than that a finite knowledge of sources is easier to work with (it’s hard to build that knowledge!), but that the part of my brain dedicated to reference is focused on changing it into something that assumes sources, patrons, and contexts outside of libraries.
Specifically, we still tend to treat reference service as a single point of contact between the library (the world of information) and the patron.
On eBay, if I’m bidding or selling, I can know how many other people are bidding or watching the auction. There’s at least two dimensions to the transaction. With AskMetafilter, dozens of people will answer me if I ask a good question. Texting and social networks are popular because they are about relationships, not points of contact. I get e-mail when you comment on this post!
So there’s been this discussion at David Lee King’s blog this past week. King (Lee King?) criticizes the way libraries communicate service expectations in virtual reference and there’s a great discussion followed by some bitter words and challenges. I think it’s great that people are thinking and talking about this issue and I’ve been encouraging people to participate.
But for me, the discussion is maddening. It boils down to this: if you only assume you are going to interact with patrons at a point of question and answer, damn right you are going to have a hard time explaining what the hell your service is about.
We still characterize virtual reference as different from face-to-face reference because of visual queues and time spent, and actually, what we’ve learned, or what I think we’ve learned, or what I’ve learned, is that in fact what makes virtual reference different than in-person reference, is that 99% of the time, patrons have equal access to, and often equal or better skill at using the primary reference tools at our disposal.
And we are just going to ignore this? Don’t touch me, don’t look over my shoulder, don’t participate, you give me a question and I’ll give you an answer?
And I’m feeling like the only reason this doesn’t go for in-person reference these days is that it’s so fucking hard to get on the internet at the library if you don’t bring your own laptop.
Rant over?
Probably this all has something to do with Amy VanScoy’s research on reference librarians’ ‘theories of practice’ that I’m hungry to see and read more of.
I would definitely feel like an ass calling the Steiners, in part because the cat was 5 in 1995 when he did the deed, and might have passed on since then. Hi, can I talk about the cat that saved your life that is now probably dead? I just wanted to find out if it was true. No, the part about saving your life.
is “ref-fu” hipster librarian speak for “kung-fu”?
and you’re right that it’s frustrating when a patron (um, like, me) goes to the trouble of hitting up a reference librarian (ref-lib?) for info and the librarian does all the searches I’ve already done (such as your Google and Wikipedia searches).
I know it’s sort of ridiculous to expect all reference librarians to have a HAL-like knowledge of every reliable (and unreliable?) reference source out there, but that’s basically my attitude: This is the expert, I’ve run out of ideas, they’d better have some GREAT ideas for me. No wonder I’m usually disappointed.
I also think that Lay-Z is a great rapper name for sloths.
joke explainer - “reasonable doubt” is the name of jay-z’s first album; ‘ref-fu’: if ‘fu’ is knowledge (and magic per kung-fu cinema), apply it as a suffix to anything. kitchen-fu, reference-fu, scrabble-fu. but of course ‘fu’ doesn’t mean that at all, but i think you took the meaning from context.
librarians definitely need to do better than google, that’s part of what i’m talking about - but not because the librarians should have the knowledge of sources, but because we should be engaging patrons in conversation, sharing tools and working together. to do that, we need to overlap with people’s lives more than just at the question/answer junction.
one of the librarians i consulted with on this project suggested, in order to find out who had won the award, that i find all the periodicals the association published and find out if the award was regularly announced in any of them, or if there was a special issue that listed the awards. now, if this had worked it would have been AMAZING, but it sort of felt like chasing down loose ends just because we had the reference books to do it. and that was the thing, the technique was dependent entirely on specific sources to carry it out, including access to the periodicals listed. you can tell it is going to fail when you don’t carry any periodicals published by that organization. still, i wouldn’t have thought of that technique on my own.