How did the University of Akron's Bierce Library end up here, and not on the campus of UIC, that bastion of towering concrete edifices? Today I took my students to a library orientation session, and the whole time I had to keep looking out the (skinny) window to make sure that I hadn't been transported back to my old haunt.
Oh, and did you know that today's student researchers can get full text and pdf journal articles online using databases? Instead of becoming marooned in the stacks, only to find that some devlish library patron had ripped the article out of the bound periodical? And subsequently crying for an hour in a musty carrel, eating an apple cinnamon Nutra Grain bar?
What's next...electronic diet pepsi?
2 comments:
Now that I'm back in school, I find it amazing how easy research truly is these days. These kids have it entirely too easy. I mean what fun is it if you can't hang out in the library's dusty basement journal holdings and find things only paging through that monstrous hardbound copy of the MLA index with its teeny tiny type(it was actually online then I believe, though not Windows based, but my college had decided tolet it's subscription lapse in favor of more general indexes.) Even in the late 90's in grad school the first time around, not much full-text stuff was available as is now.
I guess this explains why my sister, the univeristy librarian, has 5 blogs. lol
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