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Introducing COPAC

COPAC is a new nationally accessible catalogue. Based at the University of Manchester, COPAC provides unified access to the consolidated on-line catalogues of some of the largest university research libraries in the UK and Ireland. COPAC is normally available 24 hours a day 365 days a year and access is free of charge.

What does COPAC contain?

The COPAC database currently contains approximately 3.5 million records. These represent the merged on-line library catalogues of:

The records from a further twelve university library catalogues will be added in due course, and there are plans for the addition of material from further libraries in the future.

As well as providing general coverage of a very wide range of subject areas, these large research libraries have many specialist collections and particular strengths, such as foreign language materials, which make COPAC a very valuable resource for the researcher.

Most COPAC records are for books, reports etc, but there are increasing numbers for other materials such as printed and recorded music, and video. Records for periodicals make up some 4% of the COPAC database.

How do you access COPAC?

Two easy-to-use interfaces are available:

WWW Interface:
http://copac.ac.uk/copac/

Text Interface:

Telnet: copac.ac.uk
username: copac
password: copac

You can search using title words, author and organisation names, subject words, date and language. You can display search results and, in the Text interface, records can be e-mailed to your local system in a format which can be accepted by personal bibliographic software.

Help and Advice

On-line search assistance is provided and printed User Guides are available for both interfaces. Postscript versions of the User Guides are available for downloading at:

http://copac.ac.uk/copac/userguide/

The User Guides are also available on-line via the introductory screen for each interface.

For further assistance or information contact:

The COPAC Helpdesk:
E-mail: copac@mcc.ac.uk
Telephone: 0161 275 6037
Fax: 0161 275 6040

COPAC is funded by the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) and uses records provided by the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL).

Shirley Cousins
CURL OPAC Project
University of Manchester