Know the feeling

An honest historian reflects on the maddening fluidity of seemingly hard data:

I am in the final stages of preparing a manuscript for publication.... Here's my beef for today. Before I turn in this manuscript, I am checking every single footnote, every last citation, primary and secondary sources alike. And I am shocked, just shocked, at how many times I can't find the documents I had at my fingertips when I wrote the book. Admittedly, pieces of the prose date back to 2002, but I wrote most of the text in the past 2 years.