Rockstar Moment #2

Late last week, my supervisor had given me a topic to search. The topic was on salt mines. I went to the usual databases, came up with a list of titles of relevant articles, and sent them. He, in turn, let me know which ones he wanted me to get the full text.

The first three were relatively easy. Two of them are conference abstracts only and are old enough they are not available on the internets. Trying to track them down through the organization itself. One article, no matter how I searched for it - title, conference the paper was originally submitted for, author - nothing in my searches returned what I needed. I found many things close, but nothing exact.

Not ready to give up, I headed to the trusty Worldcat thinking maybe one of our ILL libraries would have a copy of the conference book/proceedings. Sure enough, one did. I sent off a quick email detailing my request, asking if it would be possible to get a copy of just the paper I needed rather than the whole book. I continued searching for other titles.

Cue today, and nothing had come back this morning with an answer. "Huh", I said to I, "perhaps I'll give things another go." I had two articles I had been unable to locate. I get my cup of tea, and turn back to the databases and search engines. Nothing quite coming up. Sometime later, I find the first article. Elated, I download the PDF to our digital library, and keep searching for the second. I try a different search string, nothing.

After a while of this, searching, nothing, searching, nothing. Nothing in the primary databases, nothing in the secondary databases. I peer again at the title, the conference proceedings. I wonder... I type in the name of the conference/symposium it was originally presented. I had tried this once before, but realized, I was continually searching for the fact it was the second annual symposium on salt; this time I searched just for 'salt symposium'. Found the website. Found the papers. And after a bit trial and error, as the paper title I had differed just slightly from the way it was titled on the website, I confirmed. Same darn paper.

There's no one in my office to appreciate these moments. The checking my sources, the finding my sources, the confirming my sources are in fact the right paper, and printing the whole shebang out for reading.

I celebrated with another cup of tea. Herbal this time.