The super-obscure book that this paper's about, that I so painstakingly read on microfilm at the NYPL, that I paid to print bits of, a couple years back? Now very much on Google Books, and a boring old PDF.
I spent probably a couple hundred dollars over the course of my college career trying to do primary source research (for an American literature seminar on the 1920s that involved printing out chunks of "The Smart Set" and other periodicals that were either defunct or didn't have archives online yet; and for a history seminar about the Cold War and Third World that involved going to the National Archives and xeroxing telegrams to Nixon). It's a good thing that the only thing I'm likely to teach is law and all that had been online long before I started studying it (contra "The Deep End" scenes of paralegals and associates buried in the stacks of a law library), or else I'd be tempted to make my students suffer and spend as I did.
What frustrates me here is that I very much was online while doing this research, but Google Books hadn't quite gotten up to where it is now. I feel like this book was probably put there precisely the day after I stopped looking for it.
I spent probably a couple hundred dollars over the course of my college career trying to do primary source research (for an American literature seminar on the 1920s that involved printing out chunks of "The Smart Set" and other periodicals that were either defunct or didn't have archives online yet; and for a history seminar about the Cold War and Third World that involved going to the National Archives and xeroxing telegrams to Nixon). It's a good thing that the only thing I'm likely to teach is law and all that had been online long before I started studying it (contra "The Deep End" scenes of paralegals and associates buried in the stacks of a law library), or else I'd be tempted to make my students suffer and spend as I did.
ReplyDeletePG,
ReplyDeleteXeroxing telegrams to Nixon, geez.
What frustrates me here is that I very much was online while doing this research, but Google Books hadn't quite gotten up to where it is now. I feel like this book was probably put there precisely the day after I stopped looking for it.