Dog with Bunny Ears

Today a girl, five years old, came up to me and asked me to help her find a movie that she had once seen at the library.  She had never watched this movie before; she just remembered seeing it on the shelf at the library once and now wanted to check it out.  Naturally, she did not remember the title of the movie.  All she remembered was that the cover featured a picture of a dog with pink bunny ears.

??

A dog with pink bunny ears?  Doesn't that just sound ridiculous? Still, I am a professional, and I promised to do my best to help her figure out what the movie was.

I asked a few probing questions but, of course, since the girl had never actually seen the movie she couldn't tell me anything about the plot or the characters.  Her nearby father (not prone to being drawn to cute images of dogs in rabbit ears) was unable to offer any additional clues.  So I decided to take a leap and try searching for Easter DVDs.  I reasoned that Easter was the only real reason that a dog would have to wear pink bunny ears.  I turned to our catalog, did a search, and one particular movie's title jumped out at me:  "An Easter Bunny Puppy."  I was able to show the girl a picture of the movie's front cover and, sure enough, she instantly recognized this movie as the one she had seen.

I'm going to be prefectly honest with you:  This movie looks pretty bad.  It's gotten terrible reviews from viewers on Amazon and IMDB.  For the curious, here's a description of the plot according to IMDB:

"A Mystery writer is not thrilled when she's assigned to write a children's book, 'An Easter Bunny Puppy.' Out of ideas, she asks her daughter for help. Meanwhile, her dog, RUSS, the narrator of the story, digs up a priceless Faberge egg buried in the woods and takes it home with him, unaware that he's trailing a thief who stole the egg."

Still, even if the movie is bad it was exactly what this little girl wanted.  Most days it's impossible to track down a movie or book just based on a description of the cover and absolutely no other clues.  It felt kind of nice to uncover this mystery movie for a lucky library user. 

Silly Questions: 1, Logic: 0

Today a pair of kids, a boy and a girl, both roughly ages 7-9, came into the children's area desperately looking for books about their favorite music personalities:  Justin Bieber and One Direction.  I'm trying to help the girl search for books (desperately repressing snide comments about Bieber's recent arrest) while the boy decides to take matters into his own hands.  Cleverly, he goes over to one of the OPACs and begins searching on his own.  Awesome!  After awhile he catches up to me with a scrap of paper in his hand and asks:

"Excuse me, where are the children's books?"

It was really hard not to crack up at this point.  After all, we're in the children's room.  All of the books are children's books!  These kids are also fairly regular library users - I'm pretty sure that he knows that we're in the children's part of the library.  Alas, sometimes such logic is lost on the young.

I stifle a giggle and tell him that all of the books in this whole room are children's books.  His eyes get big, as if this is somehow new information.  I then proceed to help him figure out how to find the book that he found in the catalog on the shelf and it evolved into - I think - a pretty good lesson on how to use the catalog and interpret what it tells us.

All's well that ends well.

Not a Biography

A woman came in today and asked if we had any books about Justin Bieber for her daughter.  Apparently she needed such a thing for a book report.  Unfortunately for her, the few books we have about the pop singer were checked out.  I asked:

"Can I help you find something else?  Does your daughter need a biography for her report?"
"No, she doesn't need a biography.  She needs a book about a famous person."

...

Oh boy.

Orange Curly Hair

Today a boy came to the library asking about a book. He didn't remember much about it at first, but we eventually tracked it down!

Here was the initial reference question:

"I'm looking for a book. I don't remember what it was called, but it's a biography about a girl with orange curly hair."

Hmm, not much to work with. So I prodded a little further to see if I could get some more information that would help us.

Do you remember what this person did that made them famous? "I think it was something about science."

Have you gotten this book from the library before? "No, my mom showed it to me when we were looking for a book about Davy Crockett."

Ah ha! This was actually a good clue. I knew exactly where to find books about Davy Crockett, and from this clue we could guess that the book came from a nearby shelf. I had a guess as to who our mystery person was at this point, but wanted to dig a little deeper just to be sure. We wandered over to the biography section to see what jumped out at us from this area. When we got there I asked one last question:

Is the person you're thinking of from today's time, or from a long time ago? "Definitely a long time ago."

Bingo! I was pretty sure that this boy was looking for a book about Marie Curie, the female scientist who did lots of work on the subject of radioactivity in the late 1800s/early 1900s. Curie and Crockett would be very near each other on the shelf, and we have lots of books to choose from about Curie so the odds seemed to be with us.

The one hiccup in this equation was that I didn't know what color Marie Curie's hair was. After all, every photograph I'd ever seen of the famous scientist was black and white. Fortunately, a Marie Curie biography jumped out at us with a colorfully-illustrated cover. The lighting in the cover picture made Curie's hair seem to glow a golden, vaguely orange, color. Part of the Giants of Science series, this biography was written by Kathleen Krull and illustrated by Boris Kulikov, and it was exactly the book that this boy had remembered! Thank goodness it was on the shelf, because it might have been tough to sell him a non-orange, black and white Marie Curie biography.

Easter Bunny's Schedule

Did you know that this is my blog's 200th post? Huzzah! To celebrate, here is a little anecdote involving two of my favorite things: Cute kids and odd reference questions.

Earlier this week a little boy, about 5 years old, came to me in complete earnest looking for some information. He asked me to help him find a book about Easter that would tell him what time the Easter Bunny would be arriving at his house. He said that he needed to know what time it would be safe to come downstairs.

I told the boy that I didn't think we would find that information in a book because the Easter Bunny goes to different kids' houses at different times. I also suggested that he ask his mom or dad if they knew what time the Easter Bunny had visited them last year - as parents, after all, they just might know the specifics of the Easter Bunny's local timetable.

But I totally see this kid's point. Why shouldn't there be a schedule? Trains and buses have schedules, so why not supernatural chocolate-carrying rabbits?

The Girliest Book in the Library

The other day, I had what was quite possibly the funniest legitimate reference/reader's advisory question ever. A boy who seemed to be about 11 or 12 years old asked me to give him the girliest book in the library. Apparently he needed the book for a bet. I decided that while I probably didn't really want to know more about the bet it was probably mostly harmless, so I found the girliest book I could think of: A Princess Primer. This is a large pink and purple book laden with jewels that teaches young girls everything they could possibly want to know about being a princess. How much girlier can you get?

The boy agreed that the book was, indeed, very girly. But it wasn't quite what he was looking for - he wanted something closer to his own reading level. I wasn't quite sure what to make of this at first. I bought myself some thinking time by explaining that often, when girls get a little older, they're not necessarily into really girly things like princesses and ponies and fairies anymore. Then I remembered some of the really girly series that we have - things like Rainbow Magic and Tinkerbell. I took him over to the paperback spinners and we talked about some of the series that are written with girls in mind. This boy seemed pretty happy with that, so I left him to browse through these books.

About 10 or 15 minutes later, the boy came back to the desk with a big smile on his face, eager to show me his final selection. But what did he pick? Nothing that I showed him, that's for sure! The book he found came from the YA shelves, which are conveniently located near the spinners where I left him. The title? Braless in Wonderland by Debbie Reed Fischer. I'm not sure if the boy read the synopsis (the story is apparently about a girl who goes to Miami to launch her modeling career) or if he was simply taken with the title. Regardless of the reasons for his selection, this boy was clearly very proud of himself for finding such as "girly" book.

Ah, the minds of 11-year-old boys never cease to amaze me...