How to get MIT course readings?

January 8, 2008 9:59 PM

Is there an easy way to get the reading materials (mostly articles) for an MIT course?

I want to do this course through MIT's Open Courseware, but the readings consist of about a hundred journal articles and book chapters. Anything I can do to spare myself a whole weekend at the library photocopying? (Have I overlooked something?)

posted by neuron to education (10 comments total)

If you belong that an institution that has access to JSTOR, I highly recommend it. I also recommend Papers if you're on a Mac to find and organise articles - I started using it a while ago, and absolutely love it.

Similar article repositories exist elsewhere of course. A good start is always Google Scholar.
posted by djgh at 10:11 PM on January 8, 2008

Unfortunately, it's not cheap to get individual access to these article databases. If you graduated from a US university, check the alumni website to see what they offer. The University of California, for example, has a $500 lifetime membership option that gives you full access to the libraries (both physical and online). This includes JSTOR, IEEE, etc.

Use Google Scholar if you want to try individual journal subscriptions. Some of them will offer a pay-per-article service, but it seems like that would cost quite a bit.
posted by spiderskull at 11:45 PM on January 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

Looks like you're in Eugene. Do you have access to the U of O library system? They almost certainly will have a way to provide access to JSTOR or similar from your home computer. The Eugene public library may or may not provide a similar service. The Multnomah County Library in Portland definitely does, as long as you have a library card.
posted by dersins at 11:48 PM on January 8, 2008

It also doesn't hurt to email one/all of the professors that 'teach' the course and ask if they have prepared a course materials for the course. Course Materials are University-copied and bound hand-outs like these that you can buy at the student bookstore. If they teach this course IRL as well as online, they probably had to get Course Materials made and you may be able to purchase them directly from MIT. It will be a lot cheaper than getting the rights to purchase all the journal articles yourself. You'd be surprised how willing profs are to find (or help find) a solution to a problem like this. :)
posted by batcrazy at 11:57 PM on January 8, 2008

Seconding spiderskull, last time I checked, you could get a one-year access to UC Berkeley's library system (which gives you online access to a lot of journals) for about $100.

And seconding batcrazy, you could ask the prof what copy store carries their course reader, then call them. Maybe the copy store can mail you a copy.
posted by salvia at 12:14 AM on January 9, 2008

This is MIT CopyTech which sells all of the MIT course readers. Here is the contact info for the particular location that should stock HST readers. You're in luck that it's a spring class (starts earkly February), so they'll probably be making course readers in the next couple weeks. Content may differ slightly from year to year, though, especially in a special/modern topics course like this one. Course readers can be ridiculous expensive because of rights issues, and you may find one of the above digital library methods to be cheaper or more convenient.
posted by whatzit at 3:40 AM on January 9, 2008 [1 favorite]

I've been corrected by CopyStar, who just made me aware that alumni don't actually get full off-campus access to journals. I get the impression that this is the case everywhere, which leaves you with the option of physically going to the campus library itself.
posted by spiderskull at 11:01 AM on January 9, 2008

An increasing number of public libraries also provide access to journals/databases at home, using an authentication based system. Call your municipal/county public library to find out if they have anything like that.
posted by daveqat at 5:01 PM on January 9, 2008

(Since others seem to be reading/marking this for future reference; if you try the Copytech route, the W20 location does not have course readers. E52 stocks mostly business and economics readers. Almost everything is sold from the Building 11 location.)
posted by whatzit at 6:55 PM on January 11, 2008

Many researchers post links to pdf's of their papers at their websites. This probably won't get all of them for you, but I'd be shocked if you didn't find a decent number of the recent articles on the webpage of the author(s). Admittedly, finding their web page may be tedious, but give it a shot, as it's usually free.
posted by HighTechUnderpants at 5:39 PM on January 16, 2008