Special Delivery Document

Attending University of Florida in 1976 or 1977, I began research on my senior project in Computer Science. Since this was in the pre-Internet era, I used the library. I went into the Engineering Library and consulted "Computer and Control Abstracts", a huge index of published literature in the computing field. From there, I identified four articles that might be helpful in my project of choice. I was able to find three of them in the vast holdings of the Engineering Library, but they didn't really pan out. The fourth sounded much more promising, but I couldn't find it. It was in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4, number 6, published by the North Holland Publishing Company. I had never heard of the journal or the publisher before. I was very impressed by the huge number of periodicals available in the long, tall stacks of the engineering library, but they did not include that one. I consulted the reference librarian who confirmed that the UF engineering library didn't subscribe to that journal. She also said it wasn't in the even larger main library buildings across campus, but maybe Florida State had it, and I could get it on an interlibrary loan from them in 6 weeks or so. (That would be totally useless to a student with a due date.) I wasn't really sure what to do next -- I really needed a starting point for this project. I had a class scheduled the next period. It was a computer science class, but not the same one for which I was researching. I went straight there from the library. I mentioned my research to no one. I was barely seated at my desk in class, when a friend of mine walked in and without a word, put a magazine on my desk. It was, incredibly, The Journal of Artificial Intelligence, Volume 4, Number 6. I was speechless. I somehow managed to ask where he got it. He said a friend of his had written off asking about subscribing. He had found it way too expensive for a student, but they had sent him a sample issue and this was it. Anyway, the friend had lent it to him and he, in turn, just thought I might be interested in it. The article was everything I had hoped it would be. I went on to complete my senior project successfully. --- On leaving the library, it seemed highly unlikely I would ever see a copy of that journal without extraordinary effort on my part. For it to show up, unasked for, within half an hour was completely amazing.