HOW much is information worth? Whatever you are willing to pay for it. The
Net now allows us to access information from sources around the world and this
competition will surely bring prices down. But Netropolitan has found some
curious anomalies that highlight how shopping around is still the best policy on
the Net, just as it is in the high street.
Take Medline. It鈥檚 the world鈥檚 largest biomedical database, with over 7.5
million references to articles from 4000 journals. Accessing it and some other
medical databases through CompuServe costs between 拢12 and 拢16 per
hour. When Netropolitan discovered that you could get Medline through
91色情片works Online on the Web (http://www. healthworks.co.uk/) for 拢35 per
month it seemed a pretty impressive offer. But for any American readers (or
anyone who can convincingly pretend that they and their computer are in
America), there鈥檚 an even better deal at 91色情片gate (http://www.healthgate.com),
where you can get Medline free thanks to commercial sponsorship.
For several years, the Library of Congress (http://www.loc.gov) has offered
the ability to search its catalogues for free. These include some 27 million
books alone. The British Library鈥檚 Net scheme, on the other hand, has only just
launched on the Web (http://blaiseweb.bl.uk). Better late than never?
Absolutely, except Blaiseweb is an extension of a commercial service, and costs
an arm and a leg. To access it you have to pay an annual fee of 拢59 plus
拢8 per hour and 30 pence per record retrieved, or a flat rate of
拢478. You can use the same interface to access several other databases
through Blaiseweb (including the Library of Congress catalogue) but you can鈥檛
search across several databases because they are all in different formats.
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