The (increasingly severe) problem from an ILL perspective is not that it's expensive or time consuming. Most law-school libraries can manage that side of things with little difficulty. The problem is that libraries (whether academic or public) are severly reducing their holdings of hard-copy newspapers ... AND their microform holdings. Why budget for them when 95%+ of your immediate, local patrons don't, and will never, need them -- being perfectly satisfied with prints from an electronic d/b.
The problem from the ILL perspective is that the underlying originals are becoming increasingly unobtainable -- not just difficult or costly to secure. That's why authors are using them less frequently; and that's why the problem Fred mentioned is ever-more-frequently raising its ugly head.
ProQuest is working on complete, digitized version of major newspapers, but they'd be fools to bother with the Peoria Journal Star; the St. Louis Post Dispatch; the Orlando Sentinel; the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; or the (New Zealand) Southland Times -- all of which popped up in our request queue this past academic year. They're available from the mega-consolidators, but near impossible (if not, actually, impossible) to obtain in any other format.
Whether journals/reviews should require that their authors cite to ONLY originals (hard-copy, microform, or PDF) is a different issue. Journals/reviews could, of course, require that their authors submit originals w/ their submitted manuscript (but none but the most prestigious are likely to be successful with a rule like that).
It's possible to carry the "authority" argument to absurd extremes. It's one thing when discussing primary source materials; an entirely different matter when discussing citations to the Southland Times.
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Stanley Conrad, JD/MLS
Reference/Special Collections Librarian
Rittenberg Law Library
St. John's University School of Law
8000 Utopia Parkway
Jamaica, NY 11439
718-990-2012
718-990-6649 (fax)
conrads@stjohns.edu
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