About us

What is Copac?

Copac exposes rare and unique research material by bringing together the catalogues of over 70 major UK and Irish libraries. In a single search you can discover the holdings of the UK’s national libraries (including the British Library), many University libraries, and specialist research libraries.  Researchers and educators use Copac to save time in their research, to quickly and easily discover and locate resources, to check document details, review materials in their field, and assess the rarity of materials etc.  Information professionals trust Copac to give them access to a unique pool of high-quality bibliographic information.

Searching Copac means you are searching a wide and varied range of library catalogues, from the collections of the Oxford and Cambridge universities to the libraries at the National Trust and Kew’s Botanical Gardens. Copac’s contributors run the gamut from conservatoires to the catalogues of the major Russian and East European Collections in the country. We are adding more libraries all the time and we have recently added the Middle Temple Library and Institution of Mechanical Engineers Library, which will mean that Copac will cover even more subjects and specialisms.

The Copac team consult with librarians and users in order to develop the service, and regularly engage with our key stakeholders such as RLUK, Jisc Innovations, CILIP, and other strategic bodies. Many of Copac’s new features are as a result of user feedback. As a result of talking with information professionals, we discovered that Copac is used in the daily routines of many libraries. It is used to facilitate work in a variety of different functions, including cataloguing and inter-library loan.

Acknowledgements

• Copac is a Mimas service, based at The University of Manchester. Copac is funded by Jisc, to deliver a service to the UK community on the basis of an agreement with RLUK. The service uses records supplied by RLUK members, which make up the vast majority of the database, as well as an increasing range of other contributing specialist libraries. A full list of contributors is available on our Libraries page.
• Copac is overseen by our Steering Committee.
• Copac is a registered trademark of The University of Manchester.