Brother Ying in Santa Cruz

Last Monday, Brother Ying paid us a surprise visit in Santa Cruz, while I thought he had left New York for Beijing the previous Sunday. When the phone screen flashed his name and number around 3:00 pm, I could not figure out where he was. “I am in Santa Clara,” he said, “I will treat you and Paul to a dinner,” he told me.

At 6:30 pm, I got home and saw a shining black Mercedes Benz sports car parked before our RAV-4. “Ying is here already,” I mumbled to myself. It was him. As usual, he got a good bargain for his rental: the rental company let him choose any cars on the lot. Of course, the Benz was chosen for a rate of $29 per day. “I remained on the left lane of 17 all the way, effortlessly,” he told us proudly.

We went to Riva Fish House on the Santa Cruz Wharf for our dinner. It was a beautiful evening. At the window table we three sat, enjoying the sunset and our generous seafood plates. Ying had the day’s special of snapper and polenta while we picked Mexican prawn and fish. Afterwards, we sauntered and visited sea lions perched on their usual three places at the end of the wharf. To our delight, we also saw many sea lion families resting on a wooden landing further away.

Paul drove us home on the scenic route. Sipping our green tea and sampling white peaches, we talked about our kids, their present and future, and new technologies. For the first time, we learned about the difference between the deep leaning and incremental learning robotics, and the possible realization of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the 21^st century. It would be a brave new world, that is for sure.

Around 10:00 pm, Ying bade us farewell to go back to his hotel in Milpitas. Early the next morning, he was due to fly to Beijing. “I will be back September 17,” he told us. His daughter is going to be a new student at Stanford.

Are Reference Services a Thing of the Past?

It has been a persistent opinion that reference services are out of fashion in libraries, with the paramount presence of search engines like Google, and many more newly developed ones to come. Three months' work at Service (Combined) Desk of Santa Cruz Library has proved otherwise.

Take yesterday afternoon for instance. I inherited a query from the previous shift that a patron wanted to know about rivers and streams in Live Oak, Santa Cruz. "She would need topographic maps," I was warned. As predicted, the patron came to the desk. It turned out that she needed to see what Berkeley Way looked like in the 1930-40's, thus the Sanborn map of 1905 would be called for. After snapping a few photos of the road, she was curious about Santa Cruz Sentinel Archives, since she could use it only from a library in the system. I demonstrated to her how to use, print/save and email the result(s). In the end, she got the exact result she wanted, but ran into the snag of the Catalog terminals' limitation, i.e., one could not email or search on the internet. My desk partner suggested that she use one of internet computers in the back. Before she left, I recommended to her a local historian on Live Oak. She hadn't returned for more information by the time I left the desk after 3:00 pm.

There was a woman at the desk asking for audiobooks on travel, as she was going to Thailand, Vietnam and Egypt. Ordinarily she would be shown to sections of 9XX for travel and 4XX for language learning, which is a normal practice. Seeing she had finished the sections in question with an armful of audiobooks, still unsatisfied, I gave her available titles by Colin Cotterill (for Thailand) and Lawrence Durrell (for Egypt). She was thrilled, especially seeing Justine, the first part in Alexandria quartet. After she left I lost no time in entering a request in our internal request database for more travel titles on DVD, particularly on the three countries in question.

In the Audiobooks section, I saw another patron who had asked me for a list of all books on CD. I gave her a tour around different categories, as the signs were either missing or too small to be seen. She stayed there quite a while before she came to us to check out her 5 audiobooks. But it is not the end of the story to serve. Her library card was lost, therefore she used her partner's card. Seeing our welcoming and inclusive atmosphere, she decided to do a replacement by paying $2.00. After hearing my recommendation of downloading/streaming digital audios, she was all ears. We went to RBdigital, and got her registered. She was so happy with her own new card which transferred 5 items from another account, and, moreover, provides a valuable newfound resource.

On my way back to my office, a smiling patron stopped me politely. He was interested not in books on CD, but in one piece, i.e., Playaways. I led him to the area and helped him figure out the unmarked section for Science Fiction. He immediately squatted down to select titles to his Sci-fi heart's content.

Once sitting in my relatively dark office, I could not help but wonder who said reference services were a thing of the past; audiobooks on CD were dead; and Playways were not circulating. All we need is to get our hands dirty by working at the desk, and serving the public with professional skills and enthusiasm!

Google and other smart search engines are truly magical, but from time to time they will encounter familiar problems such as copyrighted content or filtering out overwhelming data.