Comments on: A gathering place for UK Research

By: Owen Stephens

Owen Stephens — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:39:09 +0000

@sean
I know that the service has met with extremely high demand (I think the figures are something like in the month that the service has been in public beta, the team have received more requests than they did in the previous 6 months using the previous thesis request mechanism). I know that the British Library have invested considerably in more equipment and staff to cope with this demand at the digitisation end.
However, what the BL can’t control is how long it takes for a University to supply the thesis to them. In theory the University will have agreed to supply the thesis to the BL within a working day of receiving the request. In reality we know that this is not always possible for a wide variety of reasons. However, you have had to wait much longer than I would generally hope for.
The only practical suggestion I can make is that you contact ethos-help@bl.uk who hopefully will be able to investigate further.

By: Sean

Sean — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 04:57:08 +0000

Any general stats on turnaround times so far for digitization? Ordered a thesis on 3 February, and status is still stuck at “University contacted for paper copy.”

By: Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:50:27 +0000

I’ve done a few searches this morning, and found a few ‘features’. All in the comments here:
http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/?p=886
I’m getting sporadic errors while using it; will try to pin these down and do a proper error report.
All the best,
Roger Pearse