Working Papers in Linguistics
One of the big projects this year for our library has been to look at our “brittle books” and decide what to do with them. Do we have lots of copies, so we can sell the books that are falling apart? Should we buy new copies? Do hundreds of libraries own the book, so if folks need it, they can borrow it? (Especially if no one has checked the book out in 30 years!) Should we digitize it? Or has someone already digitized it?
Well, yesterday I was looking through the brittle books in my areas. Here was a Working Paper by Peter Ladefoged from 1967 from UCLA. (For those of you who aren’t linguists, Ladefoged is probably the most famous phonetician ever. He wrote the book that most students have used to learn about phonetics for the last 45-50 years. And he’s been tirelessly working to protect and study endangered languages. He just died in 2006.)
Anyway, this was an old paper. Not held by many libraries, but variations on it are held by hundreds. I would have liked to digitize it, but UCLA has a large number of Ladefoged’s works online. (And a wonderful memoriom to him as well.) So I checked UCLA’s site and look what I found: an archive of UCLA’s Papers in Linguistics! Just wonderful.
Not only does it include Working Papers, but also Dissertations and Master’s Theses (Master’s Theses are usually not available through ProQuest Dissertations, by the way).
Of course, the greatest site to list the grey material in linguistics, generally digitized and often free, is