07.12.2004 - 1:04 p.m.

I'm walking through the periodical stacks on the top floor of the library, surrounded by that particular smell of aging paper. I love that smell. I hate the stacks. Except for one or two trips to the shelves of current journals, I managed to avoid them for most of my college career. I managed to avoid the online resources entirely until the summer after graduation, when I had the lucky job of collecting every single extant resource mentioning "Writing Across the Curriculum," "Writing Portfolios," or "Writing Evaluation and Assessment." I think I ended up with several hundred.

(Heady stuff, oh baby, oh baby.)

Today's super fun bonus assignment was to find this particular article with a particular quote in it. I knew where they kept the journals it was probably in, so I went up there first, to the quiet aisles of bound volumes and microfiche, however you spell that, on wooden shelves with lovely lighting and nobody else there to bother me while I flipped through stitched issues. I will always love books and the places that hold them.

I will always hate the periodical stacks, and the way the College English issues only go back two years in print, three more in micro, and the one I want is a year before that. It just doesn't seem like knowledge, like scholarly truth, when it only comes in pdf.

Which, by the way, prints sooo slooowww.

-stonebridge

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