My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol3. #32, February 9, 1998

CHANGE YOUR QUESTION

We thought that we had the answers
It was the questions we had wrong
U-2

You know, my job is a bit like pulling rabbits out of hats. People come up to me all the time and tell me they can't find anything at all on their topic. When I find them dozens of books and articles and web sites and reference works, they generally seem pleased and grateful but just a little puzzled. How did I do that, anyway?

It isn't magic, of course. It's that librarians understand down to the roots of their being that the answer you get depends on the question you ask. And it also depends on whether you asked the question in a place that's likely to have an answer. If you asked your question about Saddam Hussein in ERIC, an education database, we're not surprised you found very little; we will just click on a general periodicals database and type in your question.

But if you asked ERIC questions about education reform and found nothing, we know your problem is HOW you asked the question. And we will sit down and input a variety of terms: school reform OR education reform OR charter schools. Having come up with several hundred items, far more than you really wanted to sort through, we then ask you what it is you want to know about education reform? Laws? Finance? Resulting test scores? And we add that to our search--(school reform or education reform) AND (test or tests or testing) and scores.

People in the information business are good at word games. Tell us you're looking for Stonehenge, and if all our books on Stonehenge are checked out, we think of other places we can find information on it--in books on ancient Britain, or archaeology, or the history of technology, or ancient British religions. We may know nothing about your subject, but we will ask a good question, using keyword searching, because that's how you find things by damn fool luck. When we find something, we look at the full item record and pick up new words to search with. We then use the new words to ask a better question and find still more information.

Why am I telling you in such detail about a librarian's work? You, after all, care only about getting the information. If we pull your rabbit out of the hat and hand it to you, you really don't much care how we found it, even though you could have sworn that hat was empty.

But what holds true for research, I think, holds true for life--if you don't much like the answers you're getting, you may be asking the wrong questions. If your question as you get up in the morning is whether you can stand another day of bickering at work, maybe your question should be "Do I want to work there at all?" Or you might ask, "Is there something I could do differently to help us get along better?" Sometimes just getting your head going in a different direction can be wonderfully illuminating.

It works with relationships, too. When you're just not getting through to the person you love anymore, maybe you need to ask whether you want the relationship to continue. If both of you don't answer "yes" to this question, no amount of tinkering will fix things--which is why I'm not married anymore. But if the answer is yes, that leads to some other useful questions that can help you figure out what's gone wrong and how to fix it. Like, what was it you loved about each other in the first place? And when did things start going wrong? And what am I doing that drives him crazy?

We can also apply this to our most troubling social problems. Instead of asking how we should punish teenage drug users, we could ask what's wrong with the lives of so many kids that they can't face life without getting stoned every day. Instead of dealing with every single issue as a matter of "rights", we could ask ourselves what kind of community our children will grow up in if everyone asserts their rights all the time. We might ask more often what our responsibilities are.

We might ask why we put our public issues in the hands of political grandstanders whose first approach to any problem is to decide whose fault it is. What we need is people who know how to ask the right questions. Yes, that includes librarians, and certainly you could do worse than putting librarians in charge of the world. But it also includes creative people and problem solvers of all sorts--the sort of people who notice that people are homeless and create Habitat for Humanity to build houses, who notice food that's being wasted and glean it to feed the hungry, who see that inner cities are starved for capital and set up credit unions there so the residents can buy homes, start new businesses, and revitalize the ghetto.

There are way too many people running for office with answers that are simple, comprehensive, and dead wrong. I don't want to know what their answers are, but how they arrived at them. I want to know what their questions are, and how they go about looking for answers. I want to know what kind of community they want to create with their questions and answers. If their questions are good enough, I'll be right there beside them, helping to look for solutions.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.