D sent me some choice things relevant to my work that she found - I dunno how - great stuff. I thought we might gather together tips on what is probably the most important skill for research. This also because S asked about tracking down a book. Here is my fumbled late night response. Please add any further tips if you can:
As for finding texts - this is the main skill to learn as a researcher, and the rules/ways and means are changing almost daily. I used to be that we went to the library, and if the book was not there, asked for it through Inter Library Loans. You can look up things available in different libraries, or track a book to a library.Cheers, J
That's the legal path. I mean, besides ordering and buying the book, but although of course I'd never endorse digital piracy, nowadays I can understand when students or lowly paid academics notice how a great many books are available on para-legal sites like scribd, AAAAArg, or similar. Even Amazon and Google books will give up large sections of a book online freely (again para-legal - do authors get a royalty from such partial reads?). Another site, a newcomer I think, to all this has become really efficient, for a donation: http://book4you.org/ - without donation you can download ten books a day, and its pretty comprehensive. However, just looking for you, it does not have the one you asked about.
There is a journals version of this the of thing now too - pretty much everything ever in a journal - via http://sci-hub.bz/
Of course some internet providers are finding these sites blocked by legal injunction, but others work around them just as fast. The game is changing.
So, my message, as ever to postgrad researchers, is 'skill up' - this is the time to really become efficient, which means finding out how, keeping up with changes, and not wasting your time fiddling about too much - or wasting anyone else's time for that matter :) Learn to use Interlibrary loans where you can, and digitally borrow where you must. Good luck.
I'll post this on the blog I guess. Maybe its useful.
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