[time-nuts] MIT RADIATION LABORATORY SERIES 1940-1945 (28 VOLS) on eBay

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Thu Jul 14 14:51:23 UTC 2011


On 7/14/11 6:08 AM, Steve Rooke wrote:
> It's a shame these, and other elderly scholarly works, can't just be
> released for the greater good, without all this red tape tying them
> down. I wonder how much better the world would advance if we could all
> go back to the days when we shared knowledge and skills freely between
> engineers before all the lawyers became involved. Does anyone else
> remember the hay days I wonder...

Oh yeah.. I remember how wonderful all that was..I think, overall, we're 
a lot better off today

  Getting on the bus or driving for an hour or more to go to a library 
which happened to have a copy, and then taking notes by hand from a 
bound journal after waiting for it to be retrieved from the stacks.

Waiting for several weeks while an interlibrary loan was processed and 
they mailed it to you.

Paying a nickle or dime a page in the 1970s ($.50/page today) for a 
crummy "greasy" copy of a not very wonderful microfiche image.

Even as recently as the mid 90s, it was very difficult to get online 
access to most things.  Search databases have been around for quite a 
while, and you could get the abstract sort of online, but then you'd 
have to request the article from someone like University Microfilms or 
hunt it down at a local library.

And I think it's wonderful that most universities put dissertations 
online now.  The typical "Chapter 2" of a dissertation where the author 
reviews the literature and current state of knowledge is a gold mine for 
tracking down stuff, and for half way decent synthesis of a bunch of 
stuff together.

I will say that it was fun to get the postcards in the mail from all 
over the world asking for a reprint of your paper.  Now, they just send 
you whining emails asking why the link on your website is so slow or 
broken.  And, letters asking for permission to cite or copy a figure.. 
they're pretty rare.  Instead, you find your words in someone else's 
work when googling, send them a nice note asking for attribution, and 
get an offended, "it was on the web, so I used it, whaddya gonna do'bout 
it.".  I'm just codger-like this morning.. get offa my lawn you 
whippersnappers



More information about the time-nuts mailing list