I realized today that due to my job transition this summer, I will be without access to scholarly publishing databases until I get a login and password to the library resources at my new college. I also realized that I haven’t used a print version of a scholarly article in over three years.
The Perry-Castaneda Library (aka PCL) at UT-Austin. I spent many, many, many hours here. Photo by Timothy Vollmer on Flickr.
As a grad student at UT-Austin, I was able to find just about any print journal I needed, including some very old issues from the 1940s and 1950s. I also used the university’s special collections to find old magazines for my research, which was fun. I made a special trip to Texas A&M once to look at some old editions of conservative political magazines for a research project [PDF link to article].
Since joining the faculty at Fresno State in 2008, I’ve used the library stacks a bit, but never to find a print journal article. The Fresno State library’s holdings are of course smaller than UT-Austin’s, understandably. But more significantly, I’m now relying almost entirely on databases like Communication and Mass Media Complete to find references I need, along with my beloved Google Scholar and other digital sources. I’ve used Interlibrary Loan a few times to request articles not available in full text or posted elsewhere online.
I love using the library. I loved going to find Warren Breed’s 1955 article on social control in the newsroom in a dusty old edition of the journal Social Forces. (Now it’s online, naturally.) It was compelling to me to see a half century worth of knowledge on the shelf, there for the exploration.
Of course, I’m also just as big a fan of the iPad and e-reading as anyone else out there. I taught a whole graduate course last fall without printing out a single journal article, keeping everything paperless by reading it all on the iPad.
I am curious, though, about what it means to lose a physical connection to the works of scholars of the past. A university library’s paper editions may be more accessible to community members seeking scholarly articles, so I suppose that’s an argument for retaining them, especially considering academic publishers’ grip on online distribution. (An example of the conflicts here.)
Some, uh, exciting reading. Photo by marlened on Flickr.
Do we researchers gain anything by being able to physically touch and browse scholarly journals? Are databases sufficient for journal articles, but academic books still worthy of print publication? (If so, what’s the difference?)
Maybe there’s simply a sense of connection to a scholarly legacy that is gained by keeping the paper around. When I strolled the stacks at UT-Austin during my Ph.D. program, I felt a growing sense of connection to the centuries of authors whose work surrounded me, as if it were part of my scholarly apprenticeship to simply spend time in the presence of their thoughts.
And perhaps that’s simply a romantic ideal now outdated — just as it now seems silly to think that the tangible feel of a book is irreplaceable, when I happily snuggle in bed with a Kindle book.
