research day

I spent Thursday at UC Berkeley, doing research for the Tolkien Studies bibliography, in particular catching PDFs of the articles so that I'll have them handy for the next year's "Year's Work." It was a successful and rewarding day: lots of available indexes, lots of full-text links, easy access for a visitor to the databases, no trouble getting a stack pass for the hardcopy material, and the same brilliantly designed scanners in the stacks that I've found so satisfactory before. The only irritation was the increasing number of articles that say they're about the book but are actually about the movies.

So now that UC Santa Cruz has made on-campus visitor parking permits difficult to obtain (by changing to some ornate online process instead of the old system, which was to drive up to a booth at the entrance to campus and pay them $10), and the one relevant journal that Santa Cruz carries and nobody else around here does is now online, and it's clear to me that Berkeley actually has better access to databases, I think in future I'll come here first, when my home online research is done and it's time to turn to universities.

Of course, Berkeley has no weekday on-campus visitor parking either, at least not that I've been able to figure out, but unlike Santa Cruz it's in the middle of a city, so there's commercial garages, which have space available at least if you get there before noonish.

But it was clear to me, after walking around among three campus libraries as well as venturing off-campus for lunch, that the sort of rushing around that I did as an undergraduate, all those years ago, is no longer in my repertoire.

I had one little scare when my car wouldn't start. Battery wasn't dead but the engine wouldn't respond. It was fine later, so I don't know what went wrong, but in the meantime I called the AAA, though I called back to cancel later. I'd heard that AAA now makes you fill out an online form, which I can't do unless I'm at home, because I don't have That Kind of a mobile phone, but it turns out they only send you there if you answer "yes" to the automated-vocal inquiry, "Are you calling from a mobile phone?" Otherwise they continue to ask you questions by automated voice and then eventually send you to an agent to handle any queries or problems.