Why do so many people feel a need to email large lists, such as crit-geog-forum, with a request for the pdf of an article their library doesn’t get? Surely the auto-reply that says ‘your message has been delivered to 3,808 subscribers’ would give them cause to pause before doing it again? Even if it only takes a second to delete a message in each of those subscribers’ inboxes, then that is one hour of collective time wasted. Sure, it might turn up the pdf of the article in question, but that’s to the benefit of the requester alone. And then it triggers the usual – ‘this is misuse of the list’; ‘use inter-library loan!’; etc. correspondence.

There is a much simpler way. Ask the author. I’ve done this frequently, and get such requests myself. I can’t ever recall a time that someone I contacted didn’t reply to send the piece. Authors are allowed to send the pdf of their article to people individually. So the person requesting gets what they want. And it has other benefits. At the very least this alerts someone to the fact you found their article interesting enough in the abstract to want to look at the whole thing. At best, it might trigger a correspondence on issues of shared interest. But they also prevent a lot of people who are not interested in getting your message in their inbox.