A former student rang me a few days ago. I thought he was going to ask for records of his time here – in the 1940 s.

I listened patiently as he told me about a history teacher who mentored him and took him to an exhibition about the sphinx. He received a book as a prize and it included some information about the sphinx and a photograph of the sphinx with trees around it.

As I patiently listened and waited for his inevitable request he finally asked me if I had a picture of the sphinx as his daughter-in-law is doing history and he wants to help her.

Well, where do I start? The guy would have been in his 70 s. Presumably his daughter in-law is over or in her 30 s. Our institution does not do this history nor do we have anything but encyclopaedic information.

Yes we do.

We can use the internet.

So as we spoke I entered sphinx in Google and came up with 15,500.000 entries. I asked him if he had access to the internet. Not really, he advised but his daughter (not the D-I-L) knows the ropes and can she ring me to ask about the sphinx and can I locate his photo from his prize book which shows the “sphinx with trees”?

I suggested he use the image in his book to tailor his Google search.

Oh what a brilliant tool Google is for librarians? What librarian could possibly be nervous of it? No matter what walk of life we are in, as librarians, we are the gurus who can help instantaneously. We are there for the more intimate/detailed searches which we can do through Google until we come to decide –

da da
we shall use the library stacks to find images of the sphinx, circa 1925.