Libraries

You know you're a geek when your idea of a fun Saturday night is driving to the local university's science library, finding a handful of papers you've been wanting to get for weeks, and then searching the indexes for more until the staff kicks you out because they're closing.

My library trip was motivated by the lack of services available at my local campus library. We get only a handful of biological and medical journals (less than ten at last count), have almost no online access to journals (only articles that are cataloged in services like Infotrac; we have no direct access to any journals), and we have a paltry selection of search services available (e.g. no Science Citation Index). It's so frustrating that some colleagues and I are pondering starting up a journal subscription club, with our own money, to get ourselves access to at least a handful of relevant journals.

I love many things about teaching at a community college, but our library is not one of them.