Grumbles

So... an aside.

I am researching for my thesis and realizing the limitations of the NAU Cline Library. Perhaps I long for the cramped, hunchbacked floors of Love Library at UNL; or the comfortable and nook-filled quaintness of Gustavus's Folke Bernadotte. Whatever it is, I am frustrated. First of all, in looking into housing issues, the most recent resources are inevitably other theses and dissertations. Unfortunately, these are almost exclusively limited to the universities where they were written. Not only that, but even if they were written in the last two years, let alone in the last ten, they are on paper only. Why? Why do we not have a digital compendium of theses that have not been privately published? Why do libraries not make the effort to store a few megabytes of for their theses on their databases? Bah.

So I am digging around with WorldCat (one of my favorite resources, I must say) and cannot shake the sense that I am pestering a half dozen librarians by requesting material from all over the continent, and even a conference proceedings from Stockholm. (Canadian grad students seem to be very interested in cooperative housing.) I recall reading about Ray Kurzweil's text-to-speech reader, an enormously helpful invention for the visually impaired. But with GoogleBooks raiding of libraries a bookstores - an endeavor I have mixed and generally critical feelings about - it seems that taking a thesis and putting it online would be fairly straightforward. Perhaps I am just asking GoogleBooks to support an immense thesis reservoir, a project I imagine would garner sympathy in the graduate student crowd.

Anyway, I can't let my session expire, but wanted to rant a little. If anyone has similar experience or solutions, let me know. Also, I have great respect for librarians and understand some of their various responsibilities, hence feel that whatever projects I partake ought to be as easily taken care of as possible.

Post-Script: I am using WorldCat to get ahold of some of Kenneth Grant's works to help me flesh out my Lovecraftian detective story. If you have read any of what I have written, or have spent a little too much time exploring Lovecraft and the like, Grant plays an important role. Grant links Lovecraft's writing to the occult revival in peculiar but interesting ways. I feel sort of silly about it, but also undeniably excited.