On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 12:55 PM, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/4 Durova nadezhda.durova@gmail.com:
Two words: interlibrary loan.
-Durova
That gives me an idea. Some users live in rural areas far away from large book repositories, with little capacity to check off-line resources, while other users live in metropolitan centres with dozens of vast libraries a bus ride away.
Is there a page on Wikipedia where one user (a rural user, let's presume), can ask for an offline reference to be checked ("can you check this page of this book for this statement/fact")? If not, might it be a useful service to offer?
I, for example, live in London and have easy access to a number of large university libraries and the British Library (if the resource is especially obscure). It would also be possible to scan in the relevant page of a PD/uncopyrighted book, as proof of the reference, for example.
Oldak et al, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Resource_Exchange, which appears to still be going on. What you talk about could possibly be added into this service?
-- Phoebe