Books Do Furnish a Room
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Books Do Furnish a Room I recently moved my office for the third time in two years. Our Department of Engineering is being re-structured and re-furbished. Many of you would call it re-modeling and I wish it was literally only modeling, which might involve planning and programming but no demolition crew, carpenters, or painters! However, four moves it must be (one more to get to my final destination) so I have taken each move as an opportunity to review my professional possessions. The first decisions were easy and I reduced my need for filing cabinets by about 40% at each move—at the expense of back strain shifting the re-cycling bags full of paper. Then I looked at my book shelves. I have had a life-long love-love relationship with books and had accumulated more than 1000 books, theses, and journal volumes. In the age of the web, how many of these could I now justify, and what should I do with the rest? Again, the first decision was easy—offer the journals to the library, and trash the ones they did not want. Done. The second stage was to set up a “yard sale” (or rather a “yard giveaway”) on a table outside my office door and e-mail my colleagues and all our students, asking them to help themselves. This re-housed a hundred or so volumes, but another hundred or so had to be trashed. Then I was down to the hard core. What had to remain? With one move to go (and then retirement is not far off, so my wife’s views will also need to come into play), this is where I am: Books with my name on the spine—preserved out of pure vanity, despite their low intrinsic value, particularly the older ones. My students’ theses—reprieved for the moment for reasons of nostalgia. But can they survive the next cull, when the fact that they are big and heavy and the library holds each master copy will be a telling argument? Books written to support the teaching and learning of various aspects of mate456
“I have had a life-long love-love relationship with books and had accumulated more than 1000 books, theses, and journal volumes. In the age of the web, how many of these could I now justify, and what should I do with the rest?” rials science (such as thermodynamics, dislocation theory, alloy theory, and semiconductor physics). All have gone, in a victory of realism over nostalgia in recognition that not only do I not teach these topics now, but in some cases I never have taught them! Many of these texts were collected in a spirit of optimistic pseudo-professionalism, on the premise that I should be equipped to teach any core topic if necessary. All the volumes are under-used, and some of them remain unopened since they arrived. What a weight off my shoulders and shelves. Just once, recently, I thought I might regret this draconian action. I was explaining critical nucleus size to a student, and glibly started to say, “You can read it up in…”—but the book was gone. However, two clicks in a web search located excellent lecture notes (someone else’s of course) and the problem was solved. The most dog-eared book on my shelves, I now realize,
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