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.
I don’t mean that photocopies are non-physical ….
What was the French periodical?
La Liberté de Penser: Revue Démocratique VIII.43 (1851), pp. 124-147. It’s a piece by the French individualist anarchist Anselme Bellegarrigue. After I translate it, I’ll be putting it online in both French and English.
Not that I would have known; simply curiosity. That one should be interesting.
+1 for Aston’s question.
It would be even more magical if you could upload the file or share it publically using bittorrent. You are probably held back because of copyright laws.
People are also illegally scanning books and sharing them fore free over bittorrent. Maybe they should be called “extremist librarians”? “Black market librarians”?