The ongoing conversations about the merits and demerits of mobile technologies, ebook readers, the future of print (if it has one), the differences in research and user behaviour depending on whether one has a humanities or hard sciences background is fundamental to the way we think about the future of publishing, research and libraries. While it is frequently argued that the mobile technologies are of specific use for academic articles of scientific content, where ultimately Wolfram’s interactivity will be standard, this does not need to be the exclusive domain of our scientists and STM researchers. This paper, a short story about two librarians who meet at a library conference and have an unfulfilled long distance romance for some years afterwards, is an attempt to illustrate that these worlds need not necessarily be as distant as we think they are and that maybe the ‘new technologies’ will bring them closer instead of dividing them. The story is told crucially in the form of a scientific academic article including an abstract, literature review, methodology, bibliography and all the other elements found in quality peer reviewed academic journal articles. Its aim is to focus on the importance of text and content and not how it is accessed.
STEPHEN BUCK is the part-time Electronic Resources and Periodicals Librarian in Dublin City University (DCU) and part-time Assistant Librarian at All Hallows College. Prior to this he worked as a Health Science Librarian and Computer Science/Engineering Librarian in Trinity College Dublin. He has also been a librarian in FÁS, the Irish National Training and Employment Authority and the Irish representative of CEDEFOP, The European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training. In 2005 he created, with his wife, the novelist Marian O’Neill, Pillar Press, a small literary publishing company. He has written plays for radio and stage and short stories for radio.
