The Stumpers-L listserv is a resource available for librarians and others to discuss reference questions which they're unable to answer using available resources.
Stumpers-L began as a listserv in 1992, created by Ann Feeney, a graduate library school student at Rosary College in River Forest, Illinois. It was moved to Concordia University in, then back to Rosary, which was then renamed Dominican University. Since 2002 it has been maintained by the Dominican University Graduate School of Library and Information Science program.
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.
Typical Stumpers-L topics include:
- "Which words in the the English 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 on Kombucha/Manchurian Mushroom Tea?"
- "If the average human 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 0375701745).
The unofficial mascot of the Stumpers-L list is the wombat.
External links
- Stumpers official site
- Wonderful World of Wombats, the unofficial Stumpers-L page