The fun thing about doing historical research as an individual unconnected with academia is the absolute constellation of different, ridiculously expensive paywalls you run into trying to get any info whatsoever
@AbandonedAmerica Like just trying to read a few dissertations and discovering, oh, that whole universe has been paywalled too, and I need to set up a budget to buy some. Or worse, you find a freshly-minted PhD who’s managed to keep their dissertation out of the public’s reach and only their uni library has a copy and you have to be uni faculty/student to access it (not that that stopped me, I just found someone who knew someone and presto, a pdf of the (lousy, turns out) secret dissertation).
@brianstorms yep. Watching our information ecosystem get increasingly fragmented and walled off sucks.