India office OPAC?

[Dominik Wujastyk]

In message Fri, 27 Aug 93 19:33:25 BST, stampe at uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu  writes:

> Is the catalog of the India Office in London accessible online?
>
> David Stampe <stampe at uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu>, <stampe at uhunix.bitnet>
> Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Hawaii/Manoa, Honolulu HI 96822
>

No.  Well, actually the British Library catalogue as a whole is available,
and the IO may be part of it by now.  The BL service is called "Blaise" and
costs MONEY.  I consider this to be an ongoing public scandal of serious
magnitude.  Almost a hundred British university libraries are available
over JANET free of charge, and many times that number of US libraries are
available free by ftp, including the Library of Congress itself.  I can sit
in my office and consult LC, but not the BL which is about two hundred
yards away from where I sit.  This is especially galling since I and the
rest of the British taxpayers are the sole supporters of the BL.

On the one hand, it angers me that the BL continues to charge for its
service, and on the other it saddens me since this is already leading to
the marginalization of the BL's resources.  And this is bound to continue
and intensify.  The BL will just drop out of the scholarly scene; it is
already very hard indeed to get physical access.  If library catalogues and
collections of the scale of LC, Oxford, Cambridge, Sussex, SOAS, and many
of the German collections are freely available, who is going to care two
hoots about the BL?

Dominik
--
Dominik Wujastyk           Phone (and voice messages): +44 71 611 8467