Text in further decline? The cost of paper in an academic life

Am in the middle of a major office move as the iSchool packs up from its current home and shifts to a new dedicated 40,000 sf space in a new building. Years of effort come down to a packing frenzy this week and in the course of it I have come to realize just how much paper I really have accumulated over the years. Determining what to keep and what to delete has taken a particularly poignant turn with academic journals. Books I keep but journals? Through memberships of editorial boards or professional societies, I have acquired a couple of decades worth of academic journals such as JASIST, IJHCS, BIT, ACMTOCHI, IwC and so on, not to mention innumerable issues of various others. The unfortunate truth is that I just don’t need them. If I want an article, rather than cross my office to locate it I tend to pull it up on line from our library. I started working this way years back and have given up on the paper versions. Everyone speaks of serendipity as the irreplaceable quality of browsing shelves but I can experience that digitally too by browsing. Of course one imagines needing the paper back up but I never have and I have now to recognize the reality – I could save a lot of trees, space and mailing costs if I could opt out. Sadly, not enough societies or publishers make this easy enough. Worse still, all that paper seems to be unwanted by anyone (and as I browse through some of it, I realize why — there is a lot of rubbish published in some fields). Piles of discarded books and journals sit in our corridor with an invitation to anyone interested to ‘help yourself’ to anything. The piles rarely get smaller. Libraries don’t want my old journals and while I’ve not yet tried e-bay, I have to ask, who is willing to pay the cost of shipping these somewhere? A colleague tells me she threw out all her old JASIST as part of this move as the students did not even want them for free. I just did it this morning with a load of old (and no so old) SIGCHI conference proceedings — let’s see how long they stay there. I have to say it all feels somewhat liberating but will we regret this someday?