Richard Prosser wrote:
>> My local library has pulped all the electronics books, and the Central
>> Library no longer allows access to the magazine collection... :(
>>
> One would wonder why they bother to retain it then.

The library or the magazine collection?

There are a couple of good things about the library system itself. 
Access to BSI standards free-of-charge is good when you're meddling 
around creating CAD libraries -- if memory serves, I grabbed a couple of 
schematic symbol standards from their site to use as a baseline for my 
Kicad and EAGLE libraries. Which still aren't done. Woo. (Though to be 
fair, the EAGLE symbols are pretty good, it's the PCB footprints that 
are b0rken)
If I'm being honest though... my university's ScienceDirect and ACM 
Digital Library subscriptions have been far more useful...

As for the collection itself... I seem to recall you can still get 
copies of individual articles for a fiver a go (there's a page limit but 
I can't remember what it is), but there's no refund if for some reason 
they either can't find it or can't copy it (which seems to be about 90% 
of the time). Takes about three weeks to do it, too. Also, they *do* 
have every Wireless World from 1983 onwards, but again none of them are 
catalogued to TOC level, so unless you've got an actual reference to an 
article (including title, author, issue, year and page number), you're 
up the creek.

Now, their catalogue software.. that's a different kettle of fish. It's 
an ancient version of TalisPrism that appears to date back to the early 
1990s, and is WELL overdue for replacement. Here's a lovely example...

Search for "Author: Horowitz, Paul"... zero results
Try again... "Author: Horowitz Paul"... zero results
And again... "Author: Horowitz P"... zero results
One last go: "Author: HOROWITZ, P"... one result,
   "Art of Electronics, The; Horowitz P., and Hill, W."

Well, that sounds like it... let's expand that and find out some more 
about it...

"SHELFMARK: 621.38 UNKNOWN SECTION      NO COPIES AVAILABLE"

Or if you're playing with the amber-screen terminals at the Central Library:

"FURTHER INFORMATION NOT AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME"

Or the best one:

SEGMENTATION FAULT.
TASK TERMINATED. >>>

*

Yep. Dies and drops you to a command prompt. At this point you have to 
get the library staff to restart the system. This involves a phone call 
to the council offices, and usually takes about 15 minutes. If there 
aren't any other (working or not-in-use) terminals left... um... well, I 
hope you've got something to read while you wait.


How about something else. Let's see if there's anything else interesting 
in that shelfmark (sometimes it's fun to browse).

Search: "Shelfmark: 621.38"  gets 41 results.
   (this is "Electronics")
Search: "Shelfmark: 621.382" gets 93 results. None of which were in the 
first search.
   (this is either ham radio or data transmission technologies)

So you basically have to be more specific, to be less specific... It 
doesn't understand wildcards, so you can't just do "Shelfmark: 621.38*". 
That gets you a "Security Alert: Invalid SQL detected. This has been 
logged." warning on the website, or zero results on the terminals.


The infernal contraption does word-stemming on author queries, so if you 
enter "Graf, R" as an author search, it'll do an OR search and give you 
such delights as "Grafton, Sue" and "Richards, Steven". The fun part? 
You can't actually make it do an AND search without serious effort.


For bonus points, there are Bob Pease books (actually different copies 
of the same book) listed under "Pease, Bob", "Pease, Robert" and "Pease, 
R". Consistency? What's that, then?


Lastly, the real clincher... The search times out after a couple of 
minutes (seems to be about two). So you get half-way through the search 
results and....

   SEARCH HAS TIMED OUT. Please restart your search.

It's usually easier to get a shelfmark chart from the librarian, 
scribble down the shelf codes and go look on the shelf...

-- 
Phil.
piclist@philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/
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