On Thu, Jan 25, 2001 at 09:50:42AM -0500, Albert Henderson wrote: > You have my sympathy.
Thanks but I don't need it. I don't think that the university is short-changing me. My access to math research is as good as it ever was thanks to MathSciNet, which is unfortunately proprietary but not expensive; the math arXiv, which is free; and home pages and other Internet sources. Shields Library is a Taj Mahal among campus buildings. It has tons of books and an ample, efficient, smiling staff. It has nice furniture and beautiful computer terminals. If it doesn't have absolutely every math journal, it has most of the important ones. That it is so big and unwieldy is the real problem. Spending more money on Shields would not bring it down to a human scale, nor would it bring it any closer to my office. In any case it isn't far away. It wouldn't beat the Internet no matter how much money they spent on it. I agree with you that the administration should listen to the departments more on library spending. The math and physics departments would probably cut library spending in favor of their own budgets if they could. The main reason that Shields goes beyond the utilitarian minimum is to recruit undergraduates, and even more their nostalgic parents. That could be a fine reason to spend money, but it's not for the benefit of my research. As I said, your most recent piece in Society does lie somewhere in Shields. Why not also put it on your web page like everyone else does? -- /\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis) / \ \ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/ \/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *
