Experts have been tackling the worldwide resurgence of measles for decades no, and it was only a matter of time before the scattershot outbreaks of years past turned into the year's newsworthy explosions.COMMENT
Readers curious about this infection rising phoenix like for its own ashes will find both less and more in the library than they may want. Aside from a few textbooks an pamphlets, I couldn't find a whole book devoted to measles-- not since the 10th century A. D., the is, when the Persian physician Al-Razi write "The Smallpox and Measles" to differentiate the two.
The passage comes from a bibliographic essay about vaccinations. The author assumes that you would probably not need to buy your own collection of such books, so naturally you'd look for them in a library collection.
The problem is, it's not a straightforward reference question. Looking up the word "measles" turns up medical information that is radically out-of-date and unhelpful. You could look online, but then you'd find medical sites, not a history of the disease or the development of vaccinations against it. Worse, the Internet is a prime source of misleading anti-vax propaganda that is responsible for recent measles outbreaks in the first place. If anti-vexers had started with better information research strategies, they might have made better medical decisions.
These research pitfalls are familiar to reference librarians. Biased websites, fake news, ads masquerading as "news," websites that are too specific with no context -- some medical libraries have set up websites to try to point people towards relatively more reliable medical information online. But in this instance seems like the library is not much better with its one historic reference. The author does what any good reference librarian would do and tries different vocabulary, re-focusing on the question of vaccination rather than the etiology of the disease. A spate of recent popular science books turn up, which tell a compelling tale of medical history although at least one has "some real bloopers" as far as medical science. The author comments, "that's why some wise educator long ago created textbooks."
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