Why I rarely step into university libraries nowadays

Olivia Judson, on her New York Times blog, explains how the web has radically transformed the way academics organize their literature reviews:  Here’s what I used to do, way back, oh, seven years ago when I was writing a book about the sex lives of animals. When I wanted to do research on a topic, I would go to the university library — how quaint! — and photocopy the scientific papers I wanted to read.... Having collected the papers, I would take them back to my office, type the bibliographic details (authors, title, year published and so on) into my computer and put the photocopies into folders with other papers on the same general topic. In the case of the Acanthocephalan worms, it was a folder labeled “sabotage”; for the deformed sperm, it was “other sperm.” When the time came to write up my discoveries and thoughts on the subject of sperm evolution, or how males sabotage their rivals, I went to the relevant folder, read the papers, made notes on them and started writing. As a system, it was a little clumsy — photocopying was a bore, and if I wanted to spend a couple of months writing somewhere other than my office, I had to take boxes of papers with me — but it worked. I knew what I had and where it was. Then the scientific journals went digital. And my system collapsed. On the good side, instead of hauling dusty volumes off shelves and standing over the photocopier, I sit comfortably in my office, downloading papers from journal Web sites. On the bad side, this has produced informational bedlam. The journal articles arrive with file names like 456330a.pdf or sd-article121.pdf. Keeping track of what these are, what I have, where I’ve put them, which other papers are related to them — hopeless. Attempting to replicate my old way of doing things, but on my computer — so, electronic versions of papers in electronic folders — didn’t work, I think because I couldn’t see what the papers actually were. And so, absurdly, it became easier to re-research a subject each time I wanted to think about it, and to download the papers again. My hard drive has filled up with duplicates; my office, with stalagmites of paper. And it isn’t just that I have the organizational skills of a mosquito. Many of my colleagues have found the same thing. (Yes, we talk about it. Oh, they are lofty, the conversations in university common rooms.) In short, access to information is easier and faster than ever before (for a caveat, see the notes, below, but there’s been no obvious way to manage it once you’ve got it. Judson then discusses some new software that can organize this chaos.  Speaking for myself, however, I have found that I avoided the problem Judson has run into with .pdfs with a very lo-tech but trusty procedure -- I always rename a .pdf of an article when I save it to my hard drive.  So, rather than "456330a.pdf," I would have, say, "Lektzian and Sprecher on sanctions and war."  And though there's been some duplication, this system has worked pretty well for the last five years.  I recommend grad students check out Judson's post, because it's better to develop good habits on this kind of stuff sooner rather than later.  More mature academics, however, are encouraged to discuss their own techniques for organizing their electronic article collection in the comments section.