A number of partners have been working through and with us here  at Mimas  on a  JISC funded  Collection Management project, which is part of the broader Resource Discovery Taskforce activity

Since we have all been working on this slightly under the radar, and recognising the need to share more about this project and what’s going on, we’re planning series of blog posts to update the community on the progress and lessons learned through the partnetship.  The following update is from Julia Chruszcz, who is project managing this piece of work:

Just two months into the JISC funded Copac Collection Management Project the progress has been significant. At a meeting of the project partners on the 6^th May each of the representatives from the White Rose Consortium (WRC) universities (Leeds, York and Sheffield) articulated the potential significance of this tool on their decision making processes around monograph retention and disposal and collection development. This included notions of collaborative collection development and how such a Collection Management Tool could facilitate regional and national approaches, each influencing local decisions for libraries.

The WRC has undertaken the early testing of the web-based tool in an approach that the project has adopted to inform development and iteratively assess the tool.  The idea is to build up a full specification over the life of the project of what will be required to take such a tool forward to introduce into library workflows. The next stage, between now and the beginning of July will be to further develop the batch and web technical interfaces based upon the WRC feedback and for this development to undergo further critical testing. The project is due to provide an interim report at the end of June with full report to the JISC at the end July.

The enthusiasm from all the project partners, JISC, Mimas, RLUK and WRC, stems from the realisation that we have the potential to produce a tool that will make a real difference to helping libraries make informed decisions particularly at a time of financial constraint, and assist in furthering the possibility of a national monographs collection, protecting access for researchers at the same time as facilitating local decisions that will save money and resource longer term. And all this by intelligent re-use and application of an existing extensive database, a resource invested in by RLUK and the JISC over many years, the Copac database.

If this is something you are interested in we’d really like to hear your view point and perspective.

We’re pleased to announce that JISC has funded us to work on the SALT (Surfacing the Academic Long Tail) Project, which we’re undertaking with the University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library.

Over the next six months the SALT project will building a recommender prototype for Copac and the JRUL OPAC interface, which will be tested by the communities of users of those services.  Following on from the invaluable work undertaken at the University of Huddersfield, we’ll be working with ten years+ of aggregated and anonymised circulation data amassed by JRUL.  Our approach will be to develop an API onto that data, which in turn we’ll use to develop the recommender functionality in both services.   Obviously, we’re indebted to the previous knowledge acquired by a similar project at the University of Huddersfield and the SALT project will work closely with colleagues at Huddersfield (Dave Pattern and Graham Stone) to see what happens when we apply this concept in the research library and national library service contexts.

Our overall aim is that by working collaboratively with other institutions and Research Libraries UK, the SALT project will advance our knowledge and understanding of how best to support research in the 21st century. Libraries are a rich source of valuable information, but sometimes the sheer volume of materials they hold can be overwhelming even to the most experienced researcher — and we know that researchers’ expectation on how to discover content is shifting in an increasingly personalised digital world. We know that library users — particularly those researching niche or specialist subjects — are often seeking content based on a recommendation from a contemporary, a peer, colleagues or academic tutors. The SALT Project aims to provide libraries with the ability to provide users with that information. Similar to Amazons, ‘customers who bought this item also bought….’ the recommenders on this system will appear on a local library catalogue and on Copac and will be based on circulation data which has been gathered over the past 10 years at The University of Manchester’s internationally renowned research library.

How effective will this model prove to be for users — particularly humanities researchers users?

Here’s what we want to find out:

• Will researchers in the field of humanities benefit from receiving book recommendations, and if so, in what ways?
• Will the users go beyond the reading list and be exposed to rare and niche collections — will new paths of discovery be opened up?
• Will collections in the library, previously undervalued and underused find a new appreciative audience — will the Long Tail be exposed and exploited for research?
• Will researchers see new links in their studies, possibly in other disciplines?

We also want to consider if there are other  potential beneficiaries.  By highlighting rarer collections, valuing niche items and bringing to the surface less popular but nevertheless worthy materials, libraries will have the leverage they need to ensure the preservation of these rich materials. Can such data or services assist in decision-making around collections management? We will be consulting with Leeds University Library and the White Rose Consortium, as well as UKRR in this area.

(And finally, as part of our sustainability planning, we want to look at how scalable this approach might be for developing a shared aggregation service of circulation data for UK University Libraries.  We’re working with potential data contributors such as Cambridge University Library,  University of Sussex Library, and the M25 consortium as well as RLUK to trial and provide feedback on the project outputs, with specific attention to the sustainability of an API service as a national shared service for HE/FE that supports academic excellence and drives institutional efficiencies.

The Copac team would like to wish all of our users a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Photo by Ashley Sanders

The Royal Society is a Fellowship of the world’s most distinguished scientists, which promotes the advancement of science and its use for the benefit of humanity and the good of the planet. Founded in 1660, the Society has three roles: as the UK academy of science promoting the natural and applied sciences, as a learned society, and as a funding agency.

The Library sits within the Royal Society Centre for History of Science, and contains over 70,000 titles published from the 1470s to the present day. The main strength of the collections is in the 17th and 18th centuries; from the 1680s to the mid 19th century the policy of the Library was to acquire every important scientific publication. The Centre also holds significant scientific archives, and a collection of images which includes over 6,000 photographs, engravings and paintings of past and present scientists.

Copac’s original remit was to be the merged union catalogue of the holdings of the RLUK (then CURL) libraries. This was expanded in 2006 to include libraries added through the Copac Challenge Fund (http://www.rluk.ac.uk/node/59), which aimed to ‘facilitat[e] the discovery of the widest possible range of research materials’. The specific Challenge Fund activity has ended, but we are still committed to helping to expose rare and under-used materials, and are accepting informal applications from libraries wishing to be included in Copac. We ask applicants for some information about their collections, and ensure that they meet some basic technical criteria.

Our main focus is on supporting UK education and research, and we prioritise collections with large amounts of rare, scarce, and under-exposed material. We accept applications from all types of library, not just academic and research, and we will take specific collections from a library – eg while a public library’s lending collections may not fit in with Copac’s remit, they may have special collections that do.

Our Steering Committee is meeting in September, and they’ll be discussing strategies and priorities to ensure that Copac’s growth remains mission-focussed and sustainable. Much as we as a team would be delighted to add every library, that simply isn’t feasible in the short-term for a variety of reasons. Our steering committee will help us to prioritise our inclusions over the next two years. Longer-term, we’re going to develop a new strategy for Copac, and our future approach to content development will be high on the agenda.

Until then, we’re looking at ‘quick wins’ for helping users access more content held across the UK. For instance, the ‘your local library’ tool. We’ve been working with academic libraries whose collections are not on Copac to cross-search their collections through z39.50. When a user of the library signs in to Copac, they get the opportunity to search their institution’s records alongside Copac.

If you’re interested in learning more, please email copac@manchester.ac.uk. We’d be pleased to hear from you.

We are pleased to announce that the holdings of Search Engine, the National Railway Museum’s Library, are now available on Copac.

The library and archive collections at the National Railway Museum form one of the largest resources of railway and transport history in the world. The Library Collection is international in scope and covers all time periods.

• Over 20 thousand books and 800 journal titles, of which 300 are current subscriptions
• Railway company works archives and drawings
• Official publications and publicity such as Accident Reports, holiday guides, timetables and tickets
• Technical records describing locomotive performance and design
• Extensive photographic, art and poster collection

You can see more details about Search Engine on their information page on the Copac website.

The Library contains a wealth of material, over 400,000 items, ranging from rare, early 16th-Century printed music to standard musical repertoire and from 78 rpm recordings to compact discs and DVDs. The collections of music literature include much rare material as well as all the major encyclopaedias, bibliographies, catalogues and standard works in most musical genres, as well as over 600 music periodical titles.

The addition of these holdings will greatly enhance the range of music material discoverable through Copac.

Library at Dunham Massey

The National Trust owns 140 historic libraries, containing around 230,000 titles, generally preserved in the places where they were originally assembled and read. Many are country house libraries, some collected by wealthy bibliophiles, others containing more practical everyday books, including rare provincial printing. Other collections reflect the interests of middle-class readers; some were assembled by literary figures, such as Kipling and Shaw.

Together these libraries provide an unparalleled resource for the study of the history of private book ownership in Britain and Ireland. The collections will be of interest to researchers from a wide range of disciplines, and include a huge variety of materials, from illuminated manuscripts to picture postcards.

For fuller details please see the National Trust’s Books and Manuscripts collection webpages, or contact libraries@nationaltrust.org.uk. You can also see the National Trust’s library page on Copac.

We are confident that exposure of these exciting resources will be of great benefit to the education and research communities.

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