‘The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley’, wrote the Scottish poet Robert Burns, musing on how easy it can be for things suddenly to go pear-shaped. How true! If you've stayed with us thus far your schemes will indeed have been ‘best laid’ ones. You'll have analysed the enquirer's needs to establish precisely what they want without any ambiguities, exercised your imagination to work out logically where the answer can be found, and searched systematically and professionally for the information you need. But you still can't find it, and time's running out.

It would be all too easy to feel the panic returning at a time like this. Enquirers really do think that the web has it all and you can get at it instantly, and that can trap you into agreeing to an unrealistic deadline despite your efforts to avoid it. So what you need to do is to manage their expectations while making sure you can deliver what you've promised – which is why it's so important to settle the matter of the deadline from the outset (as we discussed in Chapter 1).

But is the deadline always your problem? It clearly is if your job is to find information on behalf of other people. But what about when it's a student who's come to you with a really complex assignment which (as they so often seem to do) they've started far too late. Well, to be hard-nosed about it, you have two choices. You can tell them it's their problem and they should have thought of it sooner, leaving them to go off disgruntled with you and the library – or possibly to waste the time of a colleague on another desk in a different department.

Or you can demonstrate your professionalism in advising them what they can do in the limited time available, thereby casting yourself in the role of mentor rather than critic.