On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 9:08 PM, Phil Nash pn007a2145@blueyonder.co.uk wrote:
Oldak Quill 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.
To my eternal regret, I watched my local news programme the other night, to find that a book warehouse in Bristol had closed down and rather than skip or burn its contents, the public had been invited to come along and help themselves. If I'd been aware of it, I would have been there, because it appears that about 250,000 books were available. By the time the TV crew got there, there was very little left. Shame. There should be a way of finding out about these things, and perhaps some sort of "give us your old books" drive would be worth trying.
I picked up a couple of big biographies while rummaging through some charity shops. They now sit on a bookshelf making me feel guilty that I haven't done anything with them. I got as far as checking one Wikipedia article and finding that it was heavily referenced to the book I had, which made some sort of sense, but as for actually comparing the refs and article content to the book itself, that taks defeated me. But it is a task that both needs doing and there needs to be a way to record that x number of people have checked any particular reference and agreed with it, regardless of whether it is offline or online.
Carcharoth