I had an interesting side quest last week where the librarian of the SFPA asked me if I could find a poem I published in Alpha Adventures back in May 1988. It was written by Jovanka Kink, and I had been contacted by someone through Facebook a few months previously, but I looked for it a few times with no luck. And I find any communication through Facebook to be awkward. Terrible UI, tiny little fields to type in, weird security/sharing issues, the works.
It's not a given that someone can find an item that small from almost 40 years ago. I was living in Connecticut back when that issue went to print, and have moved a dozen times in the intervening years. I kept checking the old bankers boxes full of contributor copies of things, but it turned out it was on a shelf: a stack of old, thin digest-sized zines squished between some books.
I snapped a shot of the cover and the poem and sent it to the librarian, which to the librarian probably felt like completing a quest as well. I worried for a while that it might have been accepted for the very last issue of AA, which was canceled. At the time, I was starting up an office of software developers in So Cal, and converting the print Alpha Adventures t the short lived CD magazine AlphaDrive, which only ran two issues but was a lot of multimedia fun to put together.
Anyway ... Librarian tasks are so few and far between these days. Quest completed.
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