BLAISE‐LINE: enigma, anomaly or anachronism?

BLAISE‐LINE provides online access to all of the British Library's major catalogues. It provides access to other major bibliographies as well, notably those of the Library of Congress and Whitaker (British Books in Print). Altogether it boasts 21 files, all of a bibliographic nature, and some 15 million records. Nevertheless, it is a pigmy amongst the online giants. BLAISE‐LINE represents the very essence of the traditional library oriented online service, what with its MARC records, Dewey numbers and Library of Congress headings. This together with its raw command driven interface makes it very much the dinosaur of the online world. A survey was conducted to see what its users thought of it and whether it has much of a future in the bright, brash world of the Internet. The findings showed that its target audience — professional librarians — use it extensively for a whole range of routine library tasks and have few complaints to make about it. They used it quite differently to other online hosts. Efficiency and not user‐friendliness was uppermost in their minds — and BLAISE scored highly on the former.