paper, paper and more paper

As a historian, my lord and almighty master (as any of my co-history majors will tell you) is documents. There is nothing more essential than getting those elusive facts, numbers, statistics or images. Good history students by the end of university will have the e-resources completely figured out and all the backdoors to get into any of them.

For those massive final papers - you know, the ones where you see your history major friend huddled in a library in a fort made out of books and emerging from their rooms only at mealtimes, in which case all they talk about is their paper anyways - these documents are of the utmost importance. Students become a cyber bank robber of sorts; they will scheme and secretly try to coerce the librarians into ordering a book in that the library technically already has, but some second year who clearly has no grasp of the desperation that you are feeling has already signed out. The only difference is that bank robbers end up with pieces of paper that everyone thinks has value, whereas historians end up with copies of documents that have sat in some state department basement for decades and can mean absolutely nothing to 95% of the world population.

This entry comes at the time when my respect for the Inter-Library Loan office has grown in their ability to find me something I didn't think existed, but at the same time hatred for my addiction to documents. My fourth year essay is an examination of news coverage of the Rwandan genocide, which I thought was a neat idea. This was before I started acquiring all of the articles. The New York Times gave me 244 Word pages of articles that I not only have to read (which isn't a big deal, I'm used to reading a book and a half a week), but I now need to try and figure out the cheapest way to print them off. I've already spent $30 at Print Plus on my other major paper, and this essay doesn't end at the New York Times.

Waiting for me right now at the ILL office is microfilm of the Washington Post. I'm not sure if anyone else has used microfilm, but it's the kind way of saying "Haha, you chose something that isn't digital!" Silly me, I expected a reel or two of the stuff for what I'm looking for. NO, my order came in a BOX. With TWELVE reels. Remind me again why I took history?


Oh, right. I liked documents.