Here are some suggestions for establishing an alternative network of resources, if you are not fortunate enough to have traditional ones close at hand. They are, of course, shaped by my own experiences here in the States:

Most U.S. libraries participate in an interlibrary loan program. If your library does not have the books you want, you can ask your librarian to put in an interlibrary loan request. Quite often the book will be in the collection of a participating community college or university, and will be mailed to your library, from which you can borrow it. When I lived in central New Jersey (and didn't have access to Firestone Library at Princeton, I might add), I often borrowed books on interlibrary loan --they usually came from colleges in northern New Jersey. In New Jersey there was no charge for this service, although the overdue book fines can be pretty steep.

But how do you know what book to look for? Thanks to the World Wide Web, we can all search the online catalogs of some of the world's great libraries from our home computers. The Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov), the British Library, (http://www.bl.uk/) and many other large academic/research libraries now have online versions of their catalogs. Most of these libraries also have online help to teach you how to use the catalogs. I believe it's also possible to search the Books-in-Print database¹ --if not, we have excellent substitutes in the online catalogs of Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.²
If you need help in making a choice about what books to look for, the Web also offers a number of useful helps. A Google search on keywords will often pull up academic sites maintained by instructors in the subject. You can find a course syllabus that usually includes a reading list --"use this textbook; read these chapters from other books or journal articles." By sheerest coincidence, given my current flea infestation, I happen to be preparing a "Black Death" syllabus to go online at the medieval studies site for which I volunteer  (http://orb.rhodes.edu/). The syllabus is a classic --a colleague of mine, now retired from Dartmouth,  worked closely with the late David Herlihy at Harvard, an expert on the history of the fourteenth-century outbreak of bubonic plague known as the Black Death, and he has updated Herlihy's syllabus with newer readings. If the Black Death happened to be your interest, you couldn't find a better starter reading list than this one.

Finally, the Web itself is one huge lending library, at least for older texts and sometimes for the most cutting-edge information. Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos, was instrumental in getting "preprints" of scholarly articles online  very early in the Web's existence. See http://xxx.lanl.gov/ . The same holds true for other sciences. In the humanities, many institutions (notably the University of Virginia Text Center) have made it their mission to put public-domain literary masterpieces online. If it's no longer copyrighted, the chances are *very* good you can find it on the web somewhere. You can read the Bible, you can read all of Shakespeare, you can read many of the literary greats right through the end of the nineteenth century and on occasion even beyond. (Pay a visit to http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ to see some of the available resources.) Here at a.s.m., of course, we have extensive experience searching out web-based information. If you go to Land o'Links, you'll find URLs leading you to major gateway sites as well as links to information on how to use them. Menopause & Beyond (this site) has text resources as well as links.

So, you see, we are *all* privileged in this brave new world. Or at least those of us with computers. It's a matter of leveraging the available resources – and in the World Wide Web, we all have one very powerful tool.

Laura Blanchard
[email protected]