How do you search for CS results online?
neilc: At the times in the past when I haven't had institutional access, it has only rarely been a problem: the vast majority of the papers I want to read are freely-available online (CiteSeer, Google Scholar, DBLP, etc.). For the rare occasions when I couldn't find a free copy of a paper, I would just ask a friend of mine with ACM/IEEE/etc. access to get me a copy. The ACM/IEEE web archives are a major annoyance in theory, but I wasn't too inconvenienced in practice.