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Looking for a copy of Bridgeman's classical work, "Studies in Large Plastic Flow and Fracture"
I found it's hard to get copies of some old but classic works. Those classic works usually represent the most important findings in corresponding fields. Though thousands of new articles are published every year with easy online access, more than 90% of them will not be touched by anybody after 10 years. It's a pitty to see, however, there's no easy access to most classic old works in almost every fields.
As a specilized academic community, it will be nice if we can create a database of classic works for each sub-division of mechanics and make them available for all members. For instance, I can contribute some old papers I accumulated for fracture mechanics, which could be useful for someone else.
Well, this is just a personal advice though.
Use the channel "classic" to collect classics in our field
Classic is a channel featured in the header of iMechanica. The channel is underused, but it may provide a way for us to accumulate the classics in our field, as suggested in your post. What do you think?
Thank you, Dr Suo! It's a
Thank you, Dr Suo!
It's a good idea to utilize the available classic channel. I did not notice it before. Hopefully more of us can use this channel in the future.
Making a repository of classics
Most of the journal papers are available thse days as pdf files; and, more and more journals are also digitising their archives. So, someday, the papers will become more readily available; in such a case, it might be sufficient to have annotated bibliographies with the papers listed along with links to their DOI's.
On the other hand, the case of books is a bit tricky; most of the scientific books are not amenable to Gutenberg type of digitisations since figures, plots, micrographs, tables and illustrations form an important part of the books. From that point of view, Google books is an ideal way, where the books can be scanned and be made available. But, I do not how old the book should be so that a scanned copy can be made available to the entire world without infringing on copyrights.
In the meanwhile, if many of us write pedagogical articles about classics in our fields with liberal quoting from the original sources, that might be allowed since it is a fair use of the material. And, classics is a great channel for doing that. It might also be an ideal place to digitise and publish books which we know to be not under copyright--however, since digitising texts might be a very time consuming (not to mention intellectually unchallenging) task, I am not sure how many mechanicians will have the resources and inclination to do that. On the other hand, writing pedagoogical articles based on classic works, though also time consuming, is at least intellectually challenging as well.
Utilize the interlibrary loan
Hello, Zhigang Wei,
The Thompson Library at USC provides a service, called Interlibrary load, to help all USC students and faculty to get copies of papers, books. First look up the items on USC library website, if Thompson Library doesn't have the collection you need, then you can utilize the interlibrary loan to request them. Usually you can get a copy within two weeks. Good Luck.
Weiming