the corner office

Oh man. This year some of my varsity subjects reference a number of academic articles. In the past, anything of that sort was pre-printed and posted to us along with the rest of our study guides. This time around, because we're all grown up, we have to source the articles ourselves. I wasn't keen on having to send in periodical request cards to the university library and wait for photocopies to get posted to me, so I thought I'd take the wired approach instead. I spent over an hour trawling the Net trying to track down some rather obscure-looking articles... only semi-successfully, because geezers like the IEEE charge for access to their electronic archives. Only after I'd missioned through two subjects' worth of reading lists, did I finally hit a tutorial letter which said "get photocopies from the library or download the .pdfs from the library's website." Aaargh!

As it turns out, the library keeps pdf copies of tons of articles, and it's as simple as creating a login to get access to them, and to the library's complete catalogues and library management system. To be honest, I didn't think UNISA would be that jacked up. I'm impressed.