This is going to make me sound not young, but here it goes.

Library Stacks from Purchase College Library

When I was in grad school, if you wanted an article, you had to go over to photocopy it at the library. (Uphill, both ways, in the snow.)

Every time I went to the stacks to get the article I needed, I’d walk by the current periodicals section. That’s where the new issues accumulated before they were sent off to be bound for the stacks. There were typically several months’ worth of issues for every journal.

I usually paused to look through the new issues of some of my favorite journals, including American Naturalist, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Biotropica, Ecology, Insectes Sociaux, Oecologia, Oikos, and a upstart journal called Ecography. And many others. (The journal landscape has really evolved over the past couple decades, of course.) Continue reading →