Tim Bray thinks that what I studied is worth a lot; he calls it Real Information Retrieval - thanks :-)

"It dawned on me that now I work for a big company, and big companies have libraries, and sure enough, we do. It has a nice site on the Intranet where you can submit research requests, and so I did. Within a couple of hours, this intelligent librarian called me and wanted some more details on the numbers I was looking for.

Bearing my Bo Diddley experience in mind, I said "Instead, why don't I tell you the hypothesis I'm investigating" and he liked that idea and so I did. That was yesterday; today I find my inbox stuffed with big fat PDFs, mostly from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that seem to have about what I need."