Re: E-Journals, was Re: Correction, I hope, of M/C URL

On Wed, 15 Mar 2000 19:41:07 -0700, Brad Coon <bcoon@...> wrote:

>I totally agree but I think for different reasons.  As a reference
>librarian, the web is almost (the key word is ALMOST) always the
>very last place I will look for information.  In my library instruction
>classes I make a point of leading people down the path of comparing
>how many books are online, how many issues of how many journals, how
>many pages are personal vanity pages, .com pages and so on.  Then I
>tell them that far from 'everything being available on the web'
>almost nothing is available compared to even a modest library.
It really depends on what you're looking for. True, for most subjects, it's
hard to find more than really basic material on the web. There are a few
real gems like Jim Breen's Japanese dictionary, but those are more the
exception than the rule. On the other hand, there's an amazing amount of
information about (and examples of) microtonal music on the web,
information that I haven't been able to easily find in print. This includes
detailed descriptions of historical tunings as well as the more avant-garde
experiments in tuning. In the realm of conlangs, the only place I've seen
more than a brief description of Volapük is on the web, and probably a vast
majority of conlangs to be found on the web are unavailable in print.

But I still collect dictionaries and books about linguistics, because those
are generally more useful (with a few notable exceptions) than anything on
the web at this point in time.

--
languages of Kolagia---> +---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin