About Bound Periodicals
Bound Periodicals (2016)
In 2016, I spent countless hours over many months in the bound periodicals collection at the University of Dayton Roesch Library. Row after row of packed shelves occupied most of the extensive second floor. It was a vast repository of materials that covered a seemingly limitless number of topics. Many of its holdings dated from the nineteenth century while many were right up to date. I was intrigued, however, not so much by the contents of all those volumes, but rather by their external, visual appearance.
Purely by coincidence, just as I was coming to the end of my extended investigation, a small band of workers appeared with hand trucks and began hauling the entire collection away. It had become obsolete, a rarely used artifact from another era, one that had been brought to a close by the virtually infinite extent of digital storage and the nearly instant access offered by digital search engines. Until those workers arrived and started wheeling everything away, I had no idea I had been immersing myself in a world on the edge of disappearance.