On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/4 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2009/3/4 Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:
2009/3/4 geni geniice@gmail.com:
Doesn't work so well these days. Enough libraries have been closed and stock sold off that you don't have to get that obscure before you have to turn to the rather expensive out of county loan system. For example my county does not have a copy of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_This_Thing_Called_Science%3F
Can we not assume the whole world is situated in the middle of North America, please?
I'm kinda British.
Most of the English speaking first world is in a reasonable shape with regard to libraries. Outside that I'm not sure.
Oh, sorry, where you referring to British counties (I'm not sure what the public library system is in Britain for this kind of thing - I'm a student so have access to university libraries and inter-library loans through that which aren't expensive at all - maybe even free)? I generally assume if someone doesn't say what country they're talking about then they mean the USA - it's usually a pretty safe assumption.
Interlibrary loans at your university (or public library) are not free at all. They are just free for *you*, because your university picks up the tab for you. The average cost of an item borrowed through ILL at a typical mid-size university is between $20-$30 per item. (google: "average cost interlibrary loan", find lots of studies to this effect). This, however, is part of the cost of doing research.
Re: print accessibility: a good rule of thumb about whether something is easy to get or not is whether the item being cited is widely held at many libraries or not (see: http://worldcat.org, though this isn't anything like complete outside North America). I favor printed books that are held by many places over obscure works that are only at one or two whenever possible. Of course, sometimes this isn't possible, and a decent bibliography on any topic may be one of the greatest services Wikipedia provides in a few years. We should strive to cite it all: print works, online works, anything we can get our hands on.
-- Phoebe, one of your resident grumpy librarians