- Stumpers-L
The Stumpers-L
electronic mailing list was a resource available forlibrarian s and others to discuss reference questions which they were unable to answer using available resources.Origins
Stumpers-L began in
1992 , created by Ann Feeney, a graduatelibrary school student atRosary College inRiver Forest ,Illinois , in theUnited States . It was moved toConcordia University , then back to Rosary, which was then renamed Dominican University. From2002 to2005 it was maintained by the Dominican University Graduate School of Library and Information Science program. At the end of 2005 Dominican University ceased hosting the list. A replacement list, known as [http://project-wombat.org/ Project Wombat] , commenced in January 2006, and is hosted byProject Gutenberg .Originally the Stumpers-L archive was a gopher resource, but migrated to the
World Wide Web once the web became more universally used in the mid-1990s.Topics
Typical Stumpers-L topics include:
*"Which words in theEnglish language end in-gry ?"
*"Who wrote "The Book of Counted Sorrows ", and where can I get a copy?"
*"Is there a novel with no letter 'e' in it?"
*"Where can I find information onKombucha /Manchurian Mushroom Tea?"
*"If the averagehuman body were broken down into its constituent chemicals, how much would they be worth?"A book of Stumpers-L questions and answers was published in 1998 by
Random House , titled "Stumpers! Answers to Hundreds of Questions That Stumped The Experts" (ISBN 0-375-70174-5).The unofficial mascot of the Stumpers-L list is the
wombat .External links
* [http://www.project-wombat.org/ Project Wombat official site]
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