I must say that, in all geekiness, I am painfully jealous of people with easy access to JSTOR. For those of you not in the know, it’s basically the egghead Nexis and it goes back a billion years. When I blegged for that Political Science Quarterly article from the 1920s yesterday, numerous members of the professoriate simply punched a few doodads and sent it to me. I searched in vain to see if I could get a single-user subscription to it, which I’m sure I couldn’t have afforded anyway.

This does raise an interesting ethical question. If academics are dedicated to the spread of human knowlegde, if librarians are even more dedicated to the dissemination of learning via the printed word, why shouldn’t such a resource be available to everyone? Why create firewalls and gatekeepers to human wisdom, if that is what scholarly research is? Don’t get me wrong, I see nothing wrong with Nexis-Lexis charging for its services. They are a for-profit enterprise. But universities and libraries are not. They serve a different mission. So why keep the common man out of the intellectual Promised Land?