Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Copac is a freely available union catalogue, providing access to the merged catalogues of an increasing number of national, academic and research libraries within the UK and Ireland[1]. Our contributors range from the British Library, through major academic libraries, to small specialist libraries such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. We standardize incoming data, deduplicate and provide an easy-to-use interface to make the merged catalogues available to researchers and library staff everywhere. We also make the data available for re-use by individuals and other services through a number of machine-to-machine interfaces.
Behind the calm exterior of the Copac catalogue service, there have been significant developments underway during the past couple of years, with more planned for the future. Two major reengineering projects have been completed, including changes that help support interlibrary loan activity. Alongside this, the continuing growth of the Copac database means we have been looking at ways to make the data we have work harder, collaborating with library colleagues to develop and test tools for supporting collection management and related activity, all underpinned by the deduplicated Copac data. In future, Copac will be working within the context of the UK's National Monograph Strategy (Showers, 2014), looking initially at increased database expansion and options for developing other new services.
Rebuilding Copac
July 2014 saw the culmination of a major project with the release of a new Copac interface and a completely new database, followed, in July 2015, by our move onto a cloud system, giving us a faster, more robust platform and completing the behind-the-scenes rebuilding of the service. Some of the results of this activity are more visible than others, but all has been working towards building a robust and flexible platform both to support future development and to widen the range of services we can offer based on the Copac data, beginning with the Copac Collection Management (CCM) project[2].
The updated Copac interface introduced a much cleaner appearance with flexible display options. A significant change is the ability to expand a record consolidation made up of duplicate records from multiple contributors, so that you can see the individual constituent records that make up each consolidated record. In the past, records for pre-1800 materials were excluded from the deduplication process because of...