Tuesday, 4 September 2007

Audio items in our libraries

We're often asked why we don't have the current Top 10 available in our libraries' audio collections. Unfortunately, we can't: one of the conditions of the national agreement made between public libraries and the British Phonographic Industry is that we have to hold back new releases for three months so that it's less likely that library stock would be the source of pirate copies. This means that we're nearly always making material available some weeks after they've been in the charts.

The month that we're making a title available in our libraries can be seen in the "Status" column in the Web Catalogue record. Items that will be made available this month have the status "September release."

Titles you can look forward to this month include:
We currently charge 50p for each three-week loan of audio items (25p for Passport to Leisure holders).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks! I've often wondered why the current chart isn't available in the library. Not sure I'm happy about it but at least I know it's not your fault.

Anonymous said...

I like the way the links take you to the catalog entry. How do you do that?

  said...

Pure dumb luck: the Horizon Information Portal, which is the software that powers our Web Catalogue, generates a unique URL for each search. When I'm doing links like this I do the search, save the URL and put that into the link.

It's nice that it's the search routine, not the results, that is embedded in the URL. This means that updates to the Library Catalogue automatically get included next time you follow the link. This is really useful for author- or subject-based searches.

Thanks for the question.

Steven