British Library direct

[Tarbicus]

Thought this could be a useful link to post:
[url:1elx770w]http://direct.bl.uk/bld/Home.do[/url]

I just ordered a bunch of stuff from it, including an interview with Peter Connolly.

Cheers.

[Robert Vermaat]

Mr. Polkadot, you rock!

[Tarbicus]

Cheers mate. There's some really obscure stuff on there.

[Robert Vermaat]

Yep, weirdly priced too. Copyright costs vary from GBP 1, 44 for 30 pages to GBP 12.99 for just two!

[Tarbicus]

Indeed, but where else could you find "Phenotypic features of the domestic pigs bred in roman settlements of Pompeii and Caralis" from the ITALIAN JOURNAL OF ANATOMY AND EMBRYOLOGY? hock:

[Tarbicus]

Just to let you know how it went with the purchases and service. BLD couldn't actually supply all of the documents I ordered, which was very disappointing, but at least the ones I did get were provided pretty quickly (the money was taken only for what they could supply).

However, after clicking on the link for the first document I found I needed to activate Acrobat Reader (v6 or above only will work). This is where the problems started :? roll:

I advise that if you have the same problem, instead of threatening to throw your computer to the ground and stamp on it until it bleeds like I did, :twisted: try the following if using Internet Explorer:

- Copy the URL you are stuck on at Adobe's website.

- Go to menu item: Tools > Internet Options

- Click on the [Privacy] tab, and click [Edit] which is below 'Web Sites'.

- In the field below 'Address of Web Site' paste the Adobe URL you copied already.

- Click [Allow] - adobe.com should appear in the box below.

- Click OK, etc.

It should now work, and you could spend a pleasant 15 mins, like I, reading a Peter Connolly interview Well, once the document's downloaded, verified, approved.....

Cheers.

(addendum: After I had sent an email to BLD asking if they knew of a quick fix for the initial problem, before I fixed it myself, they replied to advise me that, although unable to fix the above problem, they could send the files in a different format. Very good service I think)

[Barry Smith]

Hi,

I am the Marketing Manager for British Library Direct and I’m really pleased to see you seem to have had a largely positive experience of the product. I can’t say that I’m an expert on the phenotypic features of roman pigs , but delivering harder to find material is certainly one of the main aims of the product and I’m glad to see that we have achieved that on this occasion.

I also wanted to provide an explanation of how copyright fees are set and why they vary so much. They are intended to recompense the publisher of the article and each has his/her own ideas about how much their intellectual output is worth. The average copyright fee is around £7.50, but with thousands of publishers represented in British Library Direct, they do vary quite significantly. You can find more on copyright fees at http://www.bl.uk/services/document/copyright.html .

I noticed you also experienced some trouble downloading your document electronically and this is due to you using version 6 of Adobe Acrobat, which makes the user 'register' their computer to get a ‘netpassport’ before downloading their document. With Version 7 (which we recommend ) this whole registration process (termed DRM or Digital Rights Management) is removed, making the experience significantly more streamlined.

I hope this helps and that you continue to find British Library Direct a useful resource. :lol:

Barry Smith
Marketing Manager, The British Library
[email protected]