more corrections

A few years ago, I cobbled together a series of corrections and additions I'd accumulated over the years for a major article I'd published about 30 years ago. I sent those updates to the original journal, two editors later, and they published it.

I've just learned of another correction that I would have included had I known about it. Another researcher, plunging into related topics, tried to order by ILL a copy of a rare article I had cited and was told that no article of that kind existed in the named issue or anywhere near it. She wrote to me and asked for help finding it.

I had received this article by photocopy from - someone else, I don't remember whom. It had no publication information on it. Where I got the citation from, I don't know either: probably the person who supplied it. But this was evidently wrong. I applied a little clever research skill and was able to determine that the article was actually five years older than I'd been told, 1976 instead of 1981.

I sent this information to the enquirer, along with a PDF of the photocopy, which came from some material I've kept in my handy file drawers all these years. She was greatly appreciative.

For a further trick, I went to a local university library which is one of the few holders of a book that one of my "Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" writers needs but which she can't get from her college's ILL, which evidently charges by the search, like the old Dialog service did. Fortunately the local university library has a usable scanner, and fortunate also that I needed only two chapters from the book. One more PDF.