ILL & EPJ Printouts

From
Date
Greetings:

Although a bit tardy, I's like to make two minor comments regarding
David's recent post comparing an EPJ vs. print media.

He wrote:
>I teach and work at a miniscule university, with few library resources
>beyond my own reference collection.  Yet, I can obtain either
>original or xeroxed materials from virtually anywhere by inter-library
>loans (ILL). It takes about a week if I ask nicely at the ILL desk,
>its very cheap, and they will try to obtain originals when I need
>photographic plates for reference.  A colleague and I did a fairly
>sizeable book about 10 years ago for which we ILL'ed about 2/3 of the
>works in a 29p bibliography.

Unfortunately, many folks a smaller universities are heavily reliant
on their ILL dept. to support their research efforts. And, having 
worked in a library for a few years and having recently
worked on a book in which ca. 75% of the refs. came to us via ILL, you
might be interested to know a bit more about how electronically savvy
your library (and ILL) may be...

Unless your library's ILL is different from ours, almost _ALL_ of the xerox
copies you receive from your library are actually scanned images sent over
the internet. In most major libraries (intl. as well as U.S.) the ILL folks
simply place the designated book pages down on a scanner and (poof!) send
them over the net to your library. It saves them xeroxing costs,
postage costs, and is the fastest way to transmit the information to
you. In some cases where scanned images cannot be received by the
host, they simply send the images as a fax. In many cases, the actual
requests are also transmitted over the internet. Almost invisibly, it
seems that many libraries have already gone "electronic".... another
anecdote to suggest that adopting a new EPJ may not be that far of a
reach at all...

>So, I can sit at my desk, and scan several comparative photos and
>pages at once, without requiring several monitors. 

With regard to perusing several papers/texts/articles/etc. at
once, you would probably not need multiple screens to do this. You
could print out those articles on paper, look them over, spread them
across your desk, etc. If photos were the concern, you could simply
page through the photos like you would a slideshow - or... put them
all on the screen at once, overlapping if necessary. Downloading the
images onto your computer would make viewing these multiple images
virtually instantaneous. 

Of course, that's just my $0.02 worth.

Sincerely,

Whitey Hagadorn

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Dept. of Earth Sciences
U. of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-0740
email: hagadorn@usc.edu			...surfing waves and the internet...
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