As for the first point, thank you for showing me that page. Of course, this is less than optimal. It is interesting that I just finished S. R. Ranganathan’s Five Laws of Library Science, when having windows for retrieval services at “Mon - Fri at 11:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m., 6:30 p.m.” breaks basically the first law from the perspective of the general public.

It is not that the resources are absolutely inaccessible for member’s of the general public, but that the University does not give the impression that they even want the general public have access. This even extends to alumni who, after paying a hefty fee to get a library card after graduation, do not even have digital access to journals—this requires a second payment to have off-site capability, and even then it is a poor subset of what a current student can access, quote “Information of professional and personal interest is available from these sources.” This does not include, implicitly, academic use but only what is available from ProQuest, a resource that can even be accessed at one’s local library for free.

I can see the perspective of the University, who must consider the needs of those it is mandated to service first, then the public (although does the University also not need to serve the public? Perhaps this is an old-fashioned idea.). However, as we are all coming to know, digital access to documents do not create a scarcity as they do for physical copies.

I don’t think we are in disagreement here, but, from the perspective of the general public—a perspective I was addressing in my post—these are not particularly “solutions.”