resources

Yesterday I spent a little time reorganizing and tidying my bookshelves. Handling old reference material, I couldn't help but notice one striking thing: Most of it isn't available online.

These days, we tend to look on the web first when we're researching a topic. Certainly there are some unique things online, things we can't easily obtain anywhere else, so in that sense it's an advance. The web is also useful when we're on a tight deadline and don't have the time to physically chase things down. But increasingly, we're lured into thinking that's enough... and now I'm not so sure that it is, at least for in-depth research.

I handled a lot of books yesterday, and of course older technical publications are pretty lengthy, and have a pretty limited audience, so it can be hard to justify posting. But it's the obscure gray literature stuff that can be especially useful and hard to find. For that matter it's not easy to find in a physical sense either; a lot of what's on my shelf had a very limited press run and most people never knew it existed. I picked a lot of it up at state agency or NGO offices, or received copies directly from authors. A few of these things find their way online, but not enough of them do.

It's a good reminder that newly available electronic resources can add to the knowledge base; if we don't simultaneously discard all that came before.