how did people google pre-google?

A fabulous collection of questions from the NY Public Library, one of my favorite buildings in NYC.

Recently some folks at the New York Public Library discovered a box containing old reference questions from the 1940s to 1980s.

They'll be posting the questions to their Instagram accounton Mondays (starting today), but have shared a bunch with us today, noting, "we were Google before Google existed." (On that note, Neil Gaiman once pointed out, "Google can bring you back 100,000 answers, a librarian can bring you back the right one.")

These were all asked either via phone or in person, and we're told, "The system back then was the same as today, in that we tried to answer right away. While we're not 100 percent sure how certain questions wound up in this box, they seem to be questions that we didn't have an answer to at the time (for example, at least one question was put in the box in the 1940s, and then answered in the 1970s)."

People still use an updated version of this, called Ask NYPL, and the library says they receive about 1,700 reference questions a month via chat, email, and phone.

Check out what people wanted to know decades ago, below—the NYPL has included answers and dates with some:

 

 

via {gothamist}