Documentation #3

Q: "Where do I click to read the original publication that you cite?"

A: This question, in one form or another, has been one of the more common to come my way. Given the abundance of reproduced text online, often the limitations of copyright and other restrictions regarding the legal boundaries of reproduction never enter the experience of the average person who searches for original source material.

Can you guess what the answer to the question is yet?

Apologia is just a mom & pop outfit. We're small, too small to provide, let alone pay for the rights to provide, full text access to the many thousands of articles cited in my writing.

Often, the more recent stuff that I've written will include a link to the original source. However, as is the case with e-mail addresses, these digital signatures do not age well. In addition, the sources that I've cited in a lot of the older stuff I've written were not "born digital" in the first place and may never exist online in any form.

So, I'm sorry, but the hard truth about this intellectual pursuit is that there is often a formidable amount of effort involved in full-text acquisition, let alone accurate source determination. And this is only the beginning. I suppose that someday, perhaps sooner than later, the skillset necessary to track down a published page in its original printed form may become quite rare. Nevertheless, it is comforting to know that this circumstance will likely motivate librarians everywhere to come to the aid of those who would like to learn more about the process.

And where does all this lead but to the confounded existence of apparent mutually qualified conflicting opinion on what sometimes seems like every point of reference one can make on any given topic. The initial path to academic enlightenment may include the early discernment of liberal vs. conservative bias. Following that may become the quandry of discovering liberals or conservatives who don't even agree with each other. And then one day, we blink with the realization that a substantial change of mind has even come about in our own mind.