Alice’s adventures in the British Library and what she found there

Comments on this blog scraped into Arcturus

We are getting close to the the ‘Allo ‘Allo, Mission: Impossible, and Alice that the British Museum enforces on academic libraries and that they accept and pass onto us, the academics. Here are two extremely helpful comments from Henry Rzepa (not a librarian but a famous chemist I collaborate with).

Read this blog very carefully although it is should really be burnt before reading. The contents can damage your rationality centres. The most dangerous bits have been highlighted by me. They seem to be a litany. Henry has made a useful attempt to understand them but they are beyond logical interpretation. I think I will ask the BL which of their millions of works of fiction they were taken from.

1. Henry Rzepa says:

   May 9, 2010 at 1:53 pm 

   The BL Secure (for whom?) electronic delivery system allows me to download an encrypted file from the server (I have 14 days in which to do this), and use it in effect just once, to print the contents. I have tested this, and indeed what I cannot do is

   a) copy (for paste) anything
   b) print to anything except a real printer
   c) print more than once

   I certainly cannot eg. extract data from the document for re-use (say a set of molecular coordinates), or eg any DOI like links to other documents. Nor can I extract any metadata which might describe the document (this capability is summed up by saying that I cannot inject this document into a system such as eg Mendeley, in order to add value to the information.

   Finally, were the document to contain interactive components (for example Acrobat 3D objects), I could not interact with them (certainly not 14 days after the document is placed on the BL server). I would imagine that Acrobat 3D is not the only potential manner in which users might interact with documents in the future.

   So my question to the BL would be: how can I add value to the document you sent me in a digital sense if you only let me print one copy?

   May 9, 2010 at 2:05 pm 

   I set out below the terms and conditions that my own library asks me to undertake when requesting they provide me with one printed copy of an identified article held by the BL. These terms are an alternative to requesting the new Secure electronic delivery system from the BL. Whether these conditions are taken verbatim in a BL document, or whether they have been interpreted locally by my library I do not know and would welcome information on.

   “I declare that:
   (a) I have not previously been supplied with a copy of the same material by you or any other librarian
   (b) I will not use the copy except for research for a non-commercial purpose or private study and will not supply a copy of it to any other person: and
   (c) To the best of my knowledge no other person with whom I work or study has made or intends to make, at or about the same time as this request, a request for substantially the same material for substantially the same purpose.”

   Clause (a) taken literally means that no-one can make more than one request for any given document. If you have lost your only permitted (printed) copy from an earlier request, you are out of luck
   Clause (b) means I cannot make a copy of my copy to give to eg a student or colleague
   Clause (c) means that colleague or student cannot ask for their own copy, because I already have.

   So I ask the BL how I might be able to collaborate for scholarly purposes with a colleague or student from my institution, where all of us might wish to independently study at the same time a given scientific article obtained under these terms from the BL.

   [Henry continues] I put the literal string above into Google, and found that pretty much every university library in the UK quotes the conditions set out above. So it appears to be a specific document, and not one unique to each institution.