Survey of the Cost of Using the British Post Office's International Data Base Access Service at the Science Reference Library

This service began in February 1977 to enable users in the UK to communicate with online information retrieval services in the United States. Up to that time, access could only legitimately be obtained by dialling continental Tymnet nodes. There has been a certain amount of uneasiness about the charges made by the PO for this service because a large element of the cost is based on the number of characters transmitted and this is difficult to assess. In order to check just what it is costing we have made a count of the characters in a sample of 21 searches, and determined the costs of characters transmitted and link up time. These are all searches carried out for users as part of the SRL's Online Search Service and so consist of fairly intensive searching with few periods when no data was either being input or received at the terminal.