31st March 2012, 12:36 PM
I've always found the local-government funded HERs in this part of the world extremely helpful, they'll regularly field 'academic' queries from me promptly and free of charge (don't tell their paymasters!) - rather to my surprise one curator appears to have spent part of yesterday rummaging through a 30 year old archive to find one very small find I was interested in, when I'd been expecting to have to take a trip over there to get dusty myself. Can't imagine that level of interest/helpfulness (and knowledge of ancient archives) from a 'commercial' HER, with the added complication that HERs run by commercial units are, whether consciously or not, going to be less helpful to commercial competitors (ie other units) - one HER I use occasionally won't even let us photocopy stuff, using the most extreme misinterpretation of the copyright laws anyone's ever come across, whereas I know that the (reputedly) entirely seperate local ex-council digging unit has the run of the place (worked there in the dim and distant....), and that kind of attitude would inevitably become more commonplace, the units who 'owned' the HERs would gradually come to monopolise the information contained therein. HERs should be kept neutral and open to all equally