Interlibrary Loan connects you to the world. If you are fortunate enough to be affiliated with an academic institution, you can peruse Worldcat (a catalog of the holdings of thousands of libraries from around the world) and order anything your heart desires. Of course, the main purpose is to support faculty and students as they do research. Maybe its one of the reasons I have always preferred academic librarianship.
All summer long I have been collecting titles of books I want to read. Some my sister recommended, some I uncovered in the line of preparing for my sacred music recital, some put forth by friends and speakers at Lakeside, and many from the bibliographies I received at St Olaf. If I were to purchase all those books, even used, I would go broke!
But thanks to all the various libraries willing to share their resources with the interested, I can request to borrow them all, and then purchase only the ones that I find really really important to my work. Which will be few, I am sure since I have an aversion to collecting anything these days. Once you collect stuff, you not only have to take care of it, but someone has to get rid of it when you die. Not a legacy I wish to leave behind.
So I have been ordering materials, and today I hit the jackpot. I must have a dozen books to read now. Yahoo. I see a weekend of treasure hunting. I am so fortunate to have such rich resources at my fingertips. Yeah.
No comments:
Post a Comment