For very many years subscribing to Journals meant accumulating large numbers of weighty and space consuming hardcopy editions. Nowadays, the move away from hardcopy journals is well underway. Nevertheless those of us who still have large sets of such documents still have the problem of dealing with them. So, I’ve decided to take the plunge and digitise my hardcopy collection of 30 years worth of the journal “Behaviour and Information technology” (BIT), and to switch to looking at new issues on screen rather than in hardcopy.

I do currently have a combined hardcopy and online subscription to BIT taken out through my professional association, the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (IEHF). So, as a first step I checked out the online site (www.tandfonline.com) and discovered that I can download all the individual papers in every volume of the journal since 1996 – provided they are for my own personal use (publishers are very edgy about journal piracy). Earlier volumes, from the journal’s inception in 1980 through to 1995, are apparently not available to me under my current subscription through the IEHF. I’ve queried this with the publisher, Taylor & Francis, and await their response. In the meantime, however, I’m going to download all those papers from 1996 onwards for which I have made an entry in my filing index. Since my index entries are linked to the relevant electronic files within my document management system, I will then have immediate access to the papers concerned after I have disposed of the hardcopy journals. Although downloading files is a whole lot easier than scanning the hardcopy pages, it still won’t be a quick job: I have references to 698 BIT papers in my index….