Insufficiently Random

The lonely musings of a loosely connected software developer.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Why Isn't 1983 Online?

I'm trying to find an electronic copy of Cook and LeBlanc's 1983 paper "A Symbol Table Abstraction to Implement Languages with Explicit Scope Control", originally published in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

Guess what: 1983 isn't on the Internet! :-x The IEEE online archives only go back to 1988 right now. Google sure as hell can't find the paper either, as it hasn't been posted in electronic form by the authors. So all I can turn up is the citation for the article, and Cook's homepage.

I've gotten so used to having things online that I find it odd when something isn't available online. One good thing about being associated with RPI is that we have access to both the ACM and IEEE online archives through the library's research subscriptions. ACM is really quite good; just about everything has been digitized and made available online with full text search. IEEE seems to have made a cutoff at 1988 leaving some important work in computer science (and I'm sure electrical engineering) unavailable.

When its 3 degrees F outside and the library is closed I sure as heck don't want to drive over to campus to lookup the dead tree version of something! IEEE - please finish your online archives!

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