Today I answered the first poetry reference question I received in my career. We received the following question via e-mail. I am changing the requester’s name to protect his privacy.
My name is "Arnold Grunt". I am in search of a very old poem I wrote in 1989. I won Honorable Mention in the 12th Annual NJ Poetry Contest. I would be a great delight to see it once again. The name of the poem is "The Once And Forever Friend".
I really hope you can locate it, Would mean the world to me. Thank you very much either way.
The obvious thing to do in this day and age is to Google the name of the poem. The next step is the Google the author’s name and poems. The next approach was to Google New Jersey Poetry Contest. These approaches were unsuccessful.
I began to wonder why this person would contact the NJIT Library since our collection is primarily geared toward scientific and engineering resources.
Just for the heck of it I searched our library’s catalog using the keywords poetry and New Jersey. I found the following book series:
The best student poetry in New Jersey. We had volumes from 1979-1990. I looked in the 1989 volume and sure enough the poem was there. I scanned the page and sent it to the requester who was in the 5th grade in 1989.
It turns out that the volumes were edited by the late Herman Estrin who put was Professor of English at NJIT. Apparently this person remembered the competition was at NJIT back in 1989 and thought to contact the school 25 years later to find his poem.
Hey! I am a chemistry librarian.
No comments:
Post a Comment