Quote Originally Posted by Crankin View Post
I bought a laser printer when I realized I would be printing so many articles. It was expensive, but worth it.
And yes, when I was (briefly) in a doctoral program in the early 80's, I spent at least $20.00 a week xeroxing articles at the library. My children were shocked that I actually had to go to the library and get the articles out of a journal to do this.
What alot of people don't realize is some of the decent full-text journal articles/books cost money to access. Your libray ID card as a taxpayer where you live for your local library or the university library ID card for the local university library that you use, is worth..money. That card is part of your membership/eligibility which your library system buys hundreds or several million $$$ worth of annual licensed access rights to those meaty research databases.

This information is really not "free" for those who don't have your library ID number or those who don't want to walk into the library to use the computer. Some of the libraries control paid database access in this way...they must to honour the publisher's licensing terms.

Doing a google search does not allow one to scour into hundreds of proprietary research databases. This is reality of the information marketplace and of technology itself.