Every once in a while, questions about (very) old papers or books pop up and the inability of the OP of said question to find them, e.g. this one or this one, posted recently only a day apart. The answer to such questions are always very similar:
- Go to your librarian
- Check Google Books
- Try to find and contact the original authors / the original publishing entity
On top of that, people often try to find the paper/book in question online themselves and post in the comments.
In most cases, these questions stay open although IMHO, they are
- Borderline shopping questions (OPs asking for a concrete source)
- Borderline duplicates of each other
- Much too specific for the scope of Academia SE
For me, it would make much more sense to make a canonical "What are strategies to find old and very old papers, books, theses, etc." question and consistently close all the specific questions as a duplicate of that canonical question.
Because as nice as it is to help an OP out with a specific paper, this is not the right platform to do so (again, IMHO).
What are your thoughts?
(If there is agreement that a canonical question would make sense, I could set that up but I don't really know how that is done...)