For the times they are a-changin'

Something happened recently that altered my professional life. I became a fan of electronic (.pdf) offprints, something I never thought would happen.

I still remember very clearly the first time that someone gave me an offprint of an article they had published. I think the year was 1977. As a graduate student I was used to photocopying articles that I thought were important, usually on very flimsy paper and often with poor print quality; and thus to get a pristine copy on good paper, attached to a cover of the journal itself, seemed a very special gift … and I could hardly wait to begin publishing myself. In later years I looked forward to receiving the big bulky packages of offprints of my journal articles, which I would then re-transmit to colleagues around the globe. It was a good way to stay in touch in a “pre-internet” age … and in turn they would send me copies of their own publications, many of which I might not have encountered otherwise, given that people in my particular field of study tend to publish in some fairly obscure places.  The value of this material for undertaking research on medieval Italy from an office in Canada was and remains “priceless”.

Over the last decade many if not most journals have stopped producing paper offprints, with some offering instead an electronic equivalent in the form of a .pdf file, still complete with the cover of the journal and sometimes even a table of contents … but I had sorely, and loudly, lamented the demise of the physical object.

My view has now changed. A week or so ago, on a Monday morning, I received an electronic copy of my latest bit of writing from a publisher in Rome, and within an hour it had been sent on to number of colleagues, primarily in Europe. In the “old days”, it would have taken 6-8 weeks for the package of hard copies to reach me by “sea mail” from Italy, and the best part of another month before they were re-shipped and received by interested colleagues. So, two months was collapsed into less than 24 hours. But that’s not what sold me.

Two days later I received an E-mail from a scholar in Britain, telling me how useful this article had been for something he was working on. I did not know this person previously, not even by name, and had certainly not sent him anything … but one of the recipients of my electronic off-print had sent it on to someone else, and that second person had re-sent it to the individual in question … something that would probably never have happened with a “paper” offprint.  I suppose it is the academic equivalent of “re-tweeting”.

And thus while I shall miss the “gifting” aspect of the previous practice, which was ever so useful for Canadian scholars who wanted to establish a solid academic network in Europe, the ease and speed of transmission … and especially the possibility of rapid re-transmission … has convinced me of the practical value of progress. I suppose that my generation will be the last to remember what academic life was like before the advent of computers and the internet.  Much has changed in the last few decades … and some of it actually for the better!

Your old road is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

(Bob Dylan, for those too young to have been listening to music in 1964)