Professoring: Drowning in Paper

Admit it: you're not going to read your first-year metrics textbook again

My dominant image of my undergraduate professors’ offices is paper. Paper in the form of books, paper in the form of journals, paper in the form of … papers, the kind undergraduates like me submitted. Younger generations may not quite understand that we have already arrived at something closer to the long-sought goal of the paperless office—even if in practice it’s more like a paper-less office. Offices of all kinds, academic or not, used to be devoted to the management of dead trees: the filing, marking, retrieval, and disposition of records on paper.

Professors’ offices, in my experience, still lean toward the paperfull versions, but few approach the sprawling off-white yellowing clumps I recall so distinctly. Even the most super of our superannuated colleagues have largely ceased acquiring paper journals—sometimes not by choice, as many journals are now digital-only. The custom of reading paper journals has long since become a symbol not of keeping current but of falling behind, since paper editions lag months or years behind the online-first publication of articles. You can observe this process almost like a geographical stratification: here we have the era of print that slowly and then suddenly stops accreting as a result of environmental changes.

It is possible—and I have seen it with my own eyes—for professors to have offices that are as devoid as print as any banker or car dealer. For the rest of us, the relics of the print age are still much with us. Literally. I mean that if you came of age before (or during) the transition from print to digital, you acquired habits that reflected how information used to be hard to find again. There were no “databases”, just indices and guides that themselves resided on print—and provided, inter alia, employment for entire lost trades of indexers and the like. (I keenly recall finding sources for my senior thesis using the Index of Current Periodicals from the 1920s and 1930s, with its small type and idiosyncratic abbreviations— “R. of Rs.” for Review of Reviews, for instance.) In that era, if you wanted to refer to a text again, you needed the text—and there was an entire lost toolbox of preprints, offprints, and reprints of journal articles, sliced neatly from the journals. I’ve even heard—but am not old enough to know firsthand—that conferences would have paper rooms where you could buy a copy (a literal, physical copy) of conference papers, which would provide an index of popularity as some stacks dwindled and others remained pristine.

Devotees of paper rightly note that digital compendia are more fragile in the long term—linkrot, copyright issues, and all the rest. Yet they too easily gloss over the actual costs of holding on to texts that might be referred to once or twice in a career—and often never again after their first use. A Kindle is the same size no matter how many books it carries, but boxes of books tend to proliferate into backbreaking sizes. Practically everyone I know in the biz has a story about movers’ resigned shoulder slumps when they see the book boxes. (Big men come to me, with tears in their eyes—big, strong men—and they say, please, no more books.)

Why hold on to books too long? The justification and the reasons differ. The justifications are almost all predigital: I want to be able to find this again, it’s out of print, whatever. The reasons are that books are totemic: these are the symbols of my craft. Yet the texts became symbols because they were not only distinctive but useful—and they were distinctive because they were useful: a professor in 1980 lived surrounded by papers because they didn’t have Dropbox, and so text accumulation was rational (as well as being a display of productivity and erudition). These days, well—ctrl+f makes up for a lot.

And so this weekend I purged many of my office shelves. Good-bye to general reading about current events in China; a book about China’s environmental policy from 2012 has almost no relevance to me now, or for that matter to China (except for antiquarians). Good-bye to books with good covers and good titles and good summaries that turned out to be inconsequentially narrow or impossible to follow—you had great publicists and lousy authors. Good-bye to methods books from before 2015: if you’re not written for contemporary R, then you’re not useful to an applied researcher. Good-bye to several first-generation Oxford handbooks: you were a painful financial sacrifice, even at conference discounts, for a graduate student, but 15 years old is death for reviews of the literature. Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye. Good-bye to a stage setting conveying what I hoped to perform.

Hello to room for growth.