I had already begun to sift through the latest scientific literature on global warming. I knew from earlier research on High Tide that scientists have now made hundreds of projections— mostly based on complex computer models— of how future global warming will affect everything from corn crops in Tanzania to snowfall in the Alps. Occasionally a particularly striking study makes headlines in the newspapers, but the vast majority of these forecasts are burred in obscure specialist journals, destined to be read only by other climatologists. Most of these journals are taken by Oxford University’s Radcliffe Science Library where they sit—undisturbed for weeks or even years on their dimly lit shelves— just a mile or so down the road from my own house. I realized that it was almost as if I had a Delphic Oracle in my back garden or Nostradamus living next door— except that these scientific prophesies were already coming true.
Earlier that year I had begun to make a daily pilgrimage down to the Radcliffe Science Library basement with my laptop, where as the weeks passed by I trawled through tens of thousands of scientific papers. Season came and went and I barely noticed. Each relevant article, I slotted into a spreadsheet—papers about two degrees of global warming went into the two-degree slot , papers about five degrees of global warming went into the five-degree slot, and so on. Not all were computer model projections— some of the most interesting material came from plaeoclimate studies, investigations of how variations in temperatures have affected the planet during previous global-warming events in prehistory. These records of past greenhouse episodes, I realized, could be analogs for the future; they, too, slotted into my six-degrees table according to the temperatures of the climatic period they represented.
At the end I found I had something truly unique: a degree-by-degree guide to our planet’s future.
COMMENT
This anecdote describes extreme research — a kind that few librarians imagine in any of our information literacy models. Lynas' goal is to construct an idiosyncratic index of scholarly journal articles based on their relation to global climate change. In order to do this he has become a library super-user, sorting through tens of thousands of scholarly articles (the final book lists 300 citations). Because of the huge number and the reference to his laptop, I assume that at least some of the “shelves” he refers to are metaphorical. He certainly must have used electronic search engines to locate articles and save the most interesting ones for a closer read.
Lynas supposes that few other people read these journals. If that’s true his oracle is highly vulnerable to library budget cuts. The project scope depends upon having access to the enormous set of shared resources in a large science library. Paying even fairly small access fees for so many articles could make the project cost prohibitive and the time lag to wait for thousands of articles “on-demand” would vastly extend the time needed to write the book. It would probably also trigger some kind of backlash from librarians.
More than once I've seen librarian colleagues act disdainful towards super-users like Lynas whom they accuse of taking up more than their “fair share” of library resources. Obviously, that could only be true when library resources are privatized through policies like inter-library loan or purchase-on- demand which provide a single copy for a single user. Ironically, these policies are enacted on the theory that it is cheaper to buy obscure articles than it is to store "undisturbed" journals.
If the Radcliffe Science Library was keeping track of journal use, the librarians might have noticed a sudden upswing of interest in climate science even though the heavy use of journal articles on the topic actually represents a single researcher writing a single ambitious book. The book sold well, though, so the project had a cascading effect distributing information far more widely than the direct audience of scholars. It might even be said that the library collection subsidized a much broader sharing of public knowledge about the effects of climate change. In that sense, use statistics would actually vastly underestimate the impact of the articles.
