My walk uphill in the snow.

The Thursday before last found me trekking over to the Biomed library in search of journal articles from the 80s. The pre-internet years. I had to make copies the old fashioned way. This is not a simple task. The Biomed library is nestled deep in the labyrinth of complex that houses the hospital, medical school, dental school, community health sciences, and the school of public health. The stacks are in the basement - this dark, weird annex that has study carrols that look like cages. The machines that dispense copy cards are only on certain floors and they have extremely conservative standards for discerning the difference between a wrinkled dollar and the old dry cleaning receipt it thinks you're trying to give instead.



After loading a card with money and locating one of the 30% of these archaic machines that work, one is free to make copies. One page of a time. No scanning. No collalating. No stapling. My concern with this system has nothing to do with the huge pain in the ass it is for me to get old articles. My concern is that this is the same procedure that medical students have to use if they're going to access journal articles written before 1994. Do they really jump through all of these hoops to get that classic 87 paper or are our future physicians asking Jeeves what to do about recurring kidney infections?