Free Reference

摘要

Any librarian worth his or her reference salt has had numerous unpleasant encounters at a public service desk. All too often, patrons (or customers, users, clientele, fill in the buzzword blank) attempt-either normally as a function of their own idiosyncratic personality or maliciously as a manifestation of their twisted psychological issues-to bait librarians into protracted disagreements and arguments with incendiary ethnic, political, social, and religious questions and comments. Recent favorites: "Is Obama a socialist, an African nationalist, or just an alien?" and, pointing to a woman in a burka, "Why do you let terrorists in the library?" But nothing pushes my proverbial buttons more than our habitual Holocaust denier and his Holocaust hoax diatribe.