Saruman boots up his iBall
Last night, around 2 a.m., after frustration at trying to transcribe the sometimes illegible file I’d gotten off of Google Books, I submitted an interlibrary loan request to the Auburn University library via the AU website. (They still call it interlibrary “loan” even when what’s requested is a scan or photocopy rather than a physical copy.)
Some time this morning, someone in the AU library sent a request to someone at the University of Michigan, who then went into the UM library stacks, found the 19th-century French periodical I was interested in, scanned a clean legible copy of the article I needed, and sent it as a PDF to my library – and it was waiting for me in my email by 10:21 a.m.