Academic Press Library in Signal Processing Volume 1. Signal Processing Theory and Machine Learning

Let us flash back to the 1970s when the editors-in-chief of this e-reference were graduate students. One of the time-honored traditions then was to visit the libraries several times a week to keep track of the latest research findings. After your advisor and teachers, the librarians were your best friends. We visited the engineering and mathematics libraries of our Universities every Friday afternoon and poured over the IEEE Transactions, Annals of Statistics, the Journal of Royal Statistical Society, Biometrika, and other journals so that we could keep track of the recent results published in these journals. Another ritual that was part of these outings was to take sufficient number of coins so that papers of interest could be xeroxed. As there was no Internet, one would often request copies of reprints from authors by mailing postcards and most authors would oblige. Our generation maintained thick folders of hardcopies of papers. Prof. Azriel Rosenfeld (one of RC’s mentors) maintained a library of over 30,000 papers going back to the early 1950s!