Reference Question: "Why Are So Many Cell Phone Calls Dropped in Cambridge?"

I thought it might be useful to use the blog as a place to share interesting and/or challenging reference questions. This could be helpful to librarians in improving our practice and also could be helpful to our student colleagues who may appreciate some insight into how think about questions and use resources. So in that spirit I offer a question I got recently, as seen in the heading of this post.

This was for a summer school student, for a journalism class, and the end result was to be a 1500 word story. The question could be approached from a number of ways and after further discussions with the student it became apparent that she was talking about specifically the AT&T network and iPhones.

We started with library resources, even though the search would have to go beyond them.

For information on how cell phone networks actually work I had her look at Web of Science and IEEE Xplore (Also called IEEE/IEL Electronic Library). IEEE had a lot of very technical information written by and for engineers; Web of Science had some overlap with IEEE but also some unique content from social science and medical journals. In both databases searches needed to have some variant of 'phone' or 'telephone' to distinguish from cellular networks being used in a biological sense.

Academic Search Premier had some unique content (and was one place where the phrase 'dropped calls' actually elicited results). ASP indexes magazines like PC World and other newsstand computer publications that might fall through the cracks elsewhere. Unfortunately most of the stories were very short news items.

I of course pointed her to LexisNexis for news stories, and to Factiva to search the Boston Globe and Boston Herald for local stories. I couldn't find much in the Boston papers (not sure how she made out in LN). I used 'service' and 'reliability' as keywords to try and capture the dropped calls aspect.

Finally we looked at Business Source Complete, again without a lot of success.

So for next steps I suggested she contact someone in Cambridge City government. The question might revolve around how many cell towers are in/near Cambridge. (The patron had found a map online and it looked like towers were in Belmont and at the airport. But she hadn't looked at Somerville so I suggested she check there. Not sure where the map was from, though I found maps on the FCC site.)

I also suggested Baker Library at HBS as a possible resource, since many of their databases are available only onsite (I know in the past they haven't been real welcoming to summer school students - not sure if that has changed).

She also planned on just walking into the local AT&T stores and asking them about it. I'm guessing they weren't going to be real anxious to talk about this.

So...at the end of all this and giving her all this information she actually said "Is there someone here who knows more about this?" These are the times that try our patience. I have to tell myself: "She's still almost a child, her brain is not developed completely."

What I wanted to say: "No, and now there's someone sitting across from you who just lost his interest in helping you any further."

What I should have said: "Could you be more specific? My job is to give you the tools to help you find the answer. It's possible there's someone on campus who knows exactly how many cell towers are in Cambridge and where they're located, but I don't know who that person is and my suggestion to talk to City Hall would seem to be a providential route to take."

But what I did say was "You might want to try the McKay Library at the Engineering School".

What do you guys think? Did I miss anything obvious? Any other ideas for finding this information? I did look at the Massachusetts state web site without much luck. And the FCC has a very slick web site, but I actually found it hard to navigate to anything useful.

And finally. I have an iPhone on AT&T and don't have problems with it in Cambridge, so this could even be neighborhood-specific.