John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Draft No.4: John McPhee on the Writing Process, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 201, pp. 129-155.
Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it "will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed... silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata." With drawn sword, the fact-checker stands at the near end of this bridge. It is in part, why the job exists and why, in Sara's words, a publication will believe in "turning a pack of professional skeptics loose on its own galley proofs." [136]COMMENT
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Today's fact-checkers always start with the Internet, they tell me, and them ramify through the New York Public Library and beyond-- a pilgrimage from the errant to the trustworthy. [146]
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[On searching for the source of a Henry Moore quote] The Internet was no help, but Josh, searching through the catalogues of the New York Public Library, learned that collections of Moore's commentaries on sculptural art were in a midtown branch, across Fifth Avenue from the library main building. After an hour or two there, he found an essay by Moore from a 1937 issue of the BBC's The Listener. In the next-to-last paragraph were the words that Lynn Fracker had rattled off to me. [p.152-153]
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[On verifying a date of birth] When Mather died, on February 13, 1728, Seccocmbe was either twenty-one or twenty-two. Which? The Internet failed me. Libraries failed me. The complete works of Joseph Seccombe and Fluviatulis Piscator failed me. I called Kingston New Hampshire, where he had served as minister for more than twenty years. The person I reached there generously said she would look through town and church records and call me back, which she did, two or three days later. She was sorry. She had looked long and hard, but in Kingston evidently the exact date of Seccombe's birth was nowhere to be found. I was about to give up and insert "in his early twenties" when a crimson lightbulb lit up in my head. If Joseph Seccombe was a minister in 1737 (the year he arrived in Kingston) he had been educated somewhere, and in those days in advanced education in the Province of Massachusetts Bay there was one game in town. I called Harvard.
By the main switchboard I was put through to someone who listened to my question and said right back, within a few seconds, "June 14, 1706."[p. 155]
What wonderful reference stories these are! Note that in the extreme sport of New Yorker fact checking, the library is only the second line of defense. McPhee gives the same advice I would give to student researchers -- try the quickest, easiest thing first. However, if that fails, the true fact-checker will be willing to go to great lengths to verify the truth of information.
Libraries figure in two of McPhee's fact-checking anecdotes. In the first the New York Public Library comes through with flying colors. Careful cataloging and a well-curated special collection focused on the artist Henry Moore eventually lead the dogged fact-checker to the source of the desired quote.
The second anecdote turns up one of those annoying failures of previous fact checkers How on Earth did whoever edited the complete works of Joseph Seccombe (a.k.a. Fluviatulis Piscator) fail to learn his date of birth? Though to be fair, it takes even the superhuman brainpower of McPhee more than a day to think of a strategy to find the answer.
In the scholarly literature of librarianship there are articles [1] that advocate replacing low-paid reference librarians with part-time staff hired from among the working poor. The primary argument for this money-saving strategy is that a category of question that used to be called "ready reference" (essentially fact-checking) has largely vanished due to the ease of Internet searching. In theory, most of the questions that still come in are too "easy" to require expert assistance. The problem is, there is actually no way to pre-determine whether a particular question is "easy" or "difficult." The question about Seccombe's birth date sounds pretty easy, but in practice it was a stumper. It turns out that regardless of various query-difficulty scales, the best proxy to measure difficulty is is, how much time it took to answer a question. [2] Many libraries keep reference statistics, but treat "extended" questions as anything over about 15 minutes. A question that takes days or weeks to answer is not that unusual, but this type of question is barely even on the reference service radar.
The best librarians will take the time to follow the really difficult questions all the way through. It's good a way to keep in practice and develop a sixth-sense about how to approach questions. The worst librarians "instruct" patrons how to do the research and then abandon them because they imagine that there is really no skill involved in tackling reference questions, or that they somehow think that skill can be acquired in a 15-minute consultation. On more than one occasion, I've observed desk staff (librarians and non-librarians) give out information that is just plain wrong. There has to be some spark of passion for the importance of fact-checking. If you don't have it, you should probably not present yourself as a reference librarian.
These days, weaponization of information has made Internet fact-checking into a minefield. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has identified disinformation as a danger that is moving the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer to Armageddon. [3] Unwary researchers are are likely to encounter unfiltered lies in disinformation generated by corporate-financed think-tanks, Russian trolls and hyper-partisan news stations. It seems urgent for librarians to re-focus information literacy instruction so that it's less about constructing scholarly bibliographies and more about fact-checking.
[1] Susan M. Ryan, "Reference transactions analysis: The cost-effectiveness of staffing a traditional academic reference desk." The Journal of Academic Librarianship;34, no. 5 (2008): 389-399. This frequently-cited article invalidates itself when the author admits that she couldn't find a method for coding the queries so she made one up. I, too, can get any result I want by jiggering the coding system.
[3]Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 2018 Doomsday Clock Statement.
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