Essay Season... but where are all the articles?

The past two weeks we have been talking about publishing in the academic world. As it is essay season, I feel inclined to use my own experience in attempting to get articles to form this entry. I am not concerned so much with how often archaeologists publish or what they publish on, but the problem seems to be making this information available to the general public and even more-so the academic community, specifically students. I have spent the past 2 days searching for specific articles that come up on the Brock database when I search for them, but for some reason tracking them down online or in the Brock library has taken up more than 8 hours of my time. This is 8 hours of me searching for the article, not finding and reading the article.

Another point of frustration is that Brock says that they have an article in their periodical section, so taking time out of my day, going up to the school, going to the seventh floor, finding the periodical the article is supposed to be in – and behold! The article is not there, and Brocks records were incorrect. I ended up deciding that I would simply have to write the paper without the article – but really, students are being robbed!

As members of a university community there is an expectation that our money will go towards databases which contain these articles. It seems that Brock, and I don’t know about other universities, seems to buy memberships to sites which only provide the bibliography for the article. This is frustrating because now students know what is out there, but have no way to access it.

I guess the point of this entry in relation to the course is that if publications are meant to be accessible to the academic community, and in turn students then there needs to be a simpler way of getting this information to the students. There are databases but most require a subscription, so if a university does not subscribe to that particular database (which trust me, it’s happened), the students are out of luck.

Furthermore, if this information is supposed to be public knowledge why must libraries and academics pay for access to these online journals – it isn’t like they have to print the paper off… what are their overheads???