Dusts of Avalon - Beastwithin.org

III. A E Sscientist with thi glasses and remarkably casual dress — jeans, college shirt anda small belt pou for his cellphone and computer — sat by his desk and lookedat his holographic monitor, examining minute details with increasing precision.But still, Dr. Grovepath's office had a paper problem. Or, rather, Dr. Grovepathhad no problems with the paper; he just had a problem with certain kinds ofpaper.Dr. Grovepath's desk occupied the far half of the small office room in thecorner of the sixth floor of the Department of Space Tenology Studies. He hadtwo small windows, and that was all daylight he needed. e remaining half ofthe room was taken up by five bookshelves, filled to brim with periodicals, withbarely space between them to fit him. e door was on that half of the room,meaning every visitor had to come through the narrow space between the shelvesand the wall.Most people visiting Dr. Grovepath in work were not at all surprised to findthe good doctor's office in su a perfectly good-doctor-like order; Dr. Grovepathknew the place was a lile bit stereotypical, but he just didn't mind it at all. Itwas all for a good reason, aer all. Yet, when Dr. Grovepath's good friend, MildredBurntwood, an artist who had done many pieces of artwork for the GreaterNewburyport University — Dr. Grovepath was happy to see her familiar handiworkin all of the broures and guidebooks he handed to the new students, andshe was largely responsible for the university's graphic design in the Network —had walked into his office for the first time, she had just sighed and said “paper.”Dr. Grovepath had just looked at her quizzically and she had just looked at thepaper piles for a while. Artists, Dr. Grovepath concluded, had strange reactionsto obvious things sometimes.e papers were only there for temporary storage; the office next to him wasin the same sort of condition, with no windows, and with two grad students busydigitising old journals and making sure everything was scanned precisely andaccurately to digital format. is was part of the centuries-old conventions noone could seem to break; some people preferred paper, some wanted their articlesin digital format, some wanted them both ways and some people just seemed toprefer the ash-based or the fabled “unallocated storage space” format, mu toDr. Grovepath's dismay and regret. Sometimes old material was only availablein digital format, whi was a simple thing to fix as far as the paper-lovers wereconcerned; the library simply printed another copy. ese journals on the shelvesof Dr. Grovepath's office were available in digital format, but not here; some lastbastions of academic publishing clung to their own lile traditions, and didn'twant to hear that the authors of the articles were fine with giving unlimited accessto them, and had full rights to demand that. Now, these almost completelydegraded paper journals were being digitised for open access.But the fluctuating nature of academic papers was not Dr. Grovepath's con-