The advert for my collection of BIT journals went in the July edition of The Ergonomist and read as follows: “If you’d like to own the entire set of Behaviour & Information Technology Journal from Volume 1 (1982) – Volume 31 (2012) this is your chance. The collection is free to any individual or organisation that would like to give them a home. If you’re interested contact Paul Wilson at pwilsonofc@btinternet.com or phone on 01296-488-066”. However, it failed to produce any responses, so I finally asked the Aylesbury Reference Library if they might be interested. They weren’t – but gave me the phone number of the new Buckingham University Technical College based on the Aylesbury College campus on Oxford Road and opening this month. I duly phoned and was put in touch with Toby Payne, Head of Science, who was keen to have them. I delivered them earlier today – but discovered in the course of packing them that the following issues were missing in the otherwise complete collection from inception of the journal in 1982 to the end of 2012:

• 1984, Vol 3, Numbers 3 and 4
• 1985, Vol 5, Number 3
• 1990, Vol 9, Number 3

I’m hoping the missing issues might be in one of the four boxes of papers I have yet to scan, and, if I do so, I’ll take them along to Toby to complete the set.

Ironically, after I got home from delivering the journals, I found an email from an Institute of Ergonomics member in Nigeria asking if they could have the journals…. an extraordinary coincidence!

My conclusion from all this is that demand for hardcopy journals is probably reducing substantially – but there are still some people out there who can find a use for them.