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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 online 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 online 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:

A Web Interface:
http://copac.ac.uk/copac/

A 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

Online 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 online via the introductory screen for each interface.

For further assistance or information contact:

The COPAC Helpdesk:
copac@mcc.ac.uk
Tel: +44 161 275 6037
Fax: +44 161 275 6040

COPAC is funded by JISC and uses records provided by the Consortium of University Research Libraries.

Shirley Cousins
COPAC Help Desk
CURL OPAC Project
National Services Group
Manchester Computing,
University of Manchester
Computer Building,
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
UK

Tel: +44 161 275 6037
Fax: +44 161 275 6040
copac@mcc.ac.uk