Copac: coming soon

Copac: coming soon...

This summer you'll have the option to login to an enhanced Copac interface with a range of more personalised services, described below. We will still retain an open access version of Copac for carrying out basic searches without a login. This is the first stage in a major redevelopment of the Copac service taking place over the next 2 years.

Local Library search

If you belong to a UK academic institution you may have the option to search your local library catalogue as part of a Copac search. This will give a merged result set with an '@ your library' icon to highlight those records held by your own library.

Initially only a limited number of local library catalogues will be accessible through Copac, but this will increase as remote search details for more library catalogues become available to us.

Journal table-of-contents

For many journals the Copac record will include the latest available table-of-contents, so when you come across a new journal title you can get an impression of the nature of the content. To provide the table-of-contents the Copac record needs to have an ISSN, try a search for the ISSN: 0307-1243.

Table-of-contents information derived from Zetoc will be visible to members of UK academic institutions. All searchers will be able to see table-of-contents derived from TicTocs.

My References

'My References' lets you save records of interest and create an online bibliography that we will retain for as long as you want it. You can annotate references, add tags, and search your reference list. Access to the 'My References' list is restricted using your university login so it is personal to you.

At the moment it is only possible to create a single bibliography. In future you should have the option to create multiple reference lists, moving records between them. We will also be looking at the option to make some lists public.

Search History

We keep a record of your research on Copac in your 'Search History'. You can now edit your 'Search History', adding tags and removing unwanted searches, to build up a set of useful searches that you might want to repeat or develop. As with the 'My References' facility the 'Search history' will be retained indefinitely for you, acting as a record of your research. As the number of searches increases you can search your 'Search History' to see what you've previously looked for eg. on a particular topic.

Other interface changes

The first few items in 'My References' and your Search History are visible on most screens, so you get a summary of what you've done recently.

You can also now Export records using the option at the end of most screens.

Knowing you

Increasingly the new Copac developments rely on us knowing what institution you belong to, or who you are as an individual. If you are accessing Copac through your university or college network then we should be able to identify your institution, which is fine for the Journal table-of-contents and Local library search feature. But if you are accessing Copac from elsewhere, or you wish to use the 'My References' option then we need to be able to identify you individually. So to use many of the new features on Copac you will need to login.

You can login with your own university (or Athens) username and password. If you have already logged into another service before you come through to Copac then you may get straight into Copac without having to re-enter your username and password.

Alternatively anyone can set up a personal ID using one of the following identity providers. They are part of the UK Access Management Federation so will let you access the new version of Copac when this is released:
  ProtectNetwork
  TypeKey

The UK Access Management Federation web site has more information about the TypeKey Identity Bridge.

In the future being able to identify you will mean we can start to offer options to personalise how you see Copac. We would appreciate suggestions for ways you'd like to change the searching or displays to suit your ways of working.

The login gory details

The Copac login uses the UK Access Management Federation. This means that if your Institution is a member of the UK Federation you can login to Copac using your own Institution username and password. A list of UK Federation member institutions is maintained on the UK Federation web site.

There will continue to be a free access version of Copac available to everyone and we will be widening login access beyond UK academic institutions before we introduce a live version of the new Copac interface.

Atom Publishing Protocol

The 'Search History' and 'My References' features both have an Atom Publishing Protocol (or APP) interface. In theory this means you can use a third party client to edit or retrieve your references and saved searches, or even add records or searches from other services.

Unfortunately there is a gotcha. As mentioned above, we are using the UK Federation mechanisms to handle user authentication — the advantages are that you as an individual do not need to register with us, you can just use the username given to you by your institution. The downside is that most client software cannot seem to get past the authentication mechanism. We have gone into further details on this in our blog post Atom and Shibboleth.