Over the course of completing my Masters I saw no need to read everything. If I picked the three most recognised sources on a topic, threw in an obscure reference where I could make one (this guy writing for this non-peer-reviewed undergraduate pre-Internet USSR journal says this, but he’s wrong), I knew I could convince my readers (ha!) that I had at least read everything I needed to. This strategy was perhaps a result of the wisdom of my honours dissertation supervisor, who routinely incited me to read deeply before broadly.
As a PhD student things have changed. The world is yours, oyster. If I so desired I could spend a month reading for a single footnote, before gnawing myself to sleep on the eve of my next meeting with my supervisor. I am endeavouring to avoid that. Not here, not now. I have noticed though that, despite the fantastic range of resources we have available through the library’s physical collections and online subscriptions, these resources have not been enough to satiate my doctoral designs for reading. Every extra citation, “cf.,” and “pace,” the latter, cognate to the English word peace, being a passively aggressive nice way to disagree with that kid from the USSR, will give the pages of that final draft on that fateful day that little extra shiny.
I have since become well acquainted with the world of Interloans, a wonderfully ecumenical enterprise in which pretty much all the books, articles, chapters and theses I need for my project can, eventually, become available to me. As Emily Dickinson once wrote, “I dwell in possibility.” But Interloans is not a faceless, nameless system, as I had somewhat hoped. Sometimes I see the receipts behind the fancy bookmarks that come with them and I shrink a little at what my two hours reading has cost the library (don’t worry, it’s often more than two hours). Also, sometimes I receive a book only to find within twenty minutes that it does not relate at all to what I’m after (so I hold onto it for a week for fear of being interrogated). For those who love reading, and know how to deal with guilt, Interloans is the system for you.