Books written in non-Roman scripts have always been a slightly tricky issue for the cataloguer: is it transliterated correctly? Does there need to be a colloquial translation? What about classification, and subject indexing? Does my OPAC support searching in different character sets? Will my OPAC return results in Arabic if the search is performed in English? Will searching in Arabic (which Copac allows) return transliterated results?

This is where we come (if you hadn’t guessed it) to the ‘ayn and the hamza. The ‘ayn is a letter in the Arabic alphabet, while the hamza represents a glottal stop, and they are both often (incorrectly) transliterated as apsotrophes.

This makes the cataloguer’s job even more tricky. Add to this the fact that we deal with the records of over 50 libraries – records which have been created over a large number of years, during which cataloguing practices have changed – and you can see that we have a bit of a situation.

Apostrophes are, as a general rule, non-filing characters in catalogue records. But what do you do when an apostrophe is not an apostrophe? This problem with ‘ayns and hamzas (which can occur at the beginning, middle or end of words) was making it very difficult to find Arabic records on Copac: whether you included the correct character; an apostrophe; or nothing at all, you were unlikely to get the results you wanted.

Paul Auchterlonie, Librarian for Middle East Studies at Exeter, took the opportunity of being interviewed by me about Exeter’s experiences of being a member of Copac to raise this issue. He not only raised it, he entirely convinced me (who had never heard of either an ‘ayn or a hamza before in my life) of its importance. Then the Copac staff fixed it. Simple, no?

Well, not that simple. The fixing did take Shirley and Ashley some time and effort. Then the data had to be reloaded. And all is not entirely well yet: records in Farsi and Hebrew which have similar problems still need to be reloaded. But the moral of the tale: have a problem with Copac? Let us know! We like fixing things

DISCLAIMER: While Copac staff do like fixing things, there are issues which we can do nothing about (in the short term, at least – we’re looking at long-term solutions for many issues). This makes us sad. If we can’t fix your issue immediately, please be assured that it’s not because we don’t want to!

This has been a very welcome opportunity for me to actually have a chat to

A detail from the interior of Chetham's Library

some of the librarians. As with many people now, most of our communicating is done by email, which tends to be quite impersonal and business-focussed. Having the chance to chat to people on the phone makes for a more personal connection, and you can get a different sense of the person you’re dealing with.

Although I talked to most people by phone, we did manage a mini-Copac field-trip to Chetham’s Library, where my colleage Lisa Jeskins and I were given a tour and some fantastic coffee (both of which we enjoyed very much) followed by a very interesting discussion about a number of issues, including what kind of impact being part of Copac has had for Chetham’s library. Conversations with libraries have all started from the same list of questions, and then digressed in various directions. It has been very interesting to see the emphasis on different areas from different libraries: we’ve talked about subjects ranging from the quality of catalogue records and the importance of in-depth cataloguing; to specifics of the Copac interface; and potential future mash-ups.

With Chetham’s, we arrived at a discussion about mutual promotions/marketing. This has been a theme I have been discussing with all of the libraries, as we are reviewing our promotions strategy, and looking for new ways to promote Copac and our contributors. We have been discussing a number of possibilities, including that of having subject foci on the website – something along the lines of the Archives Hub’s Collection of the Month.

All of the libraries I’ve spoken to have expressed interest in/approval of/willingness to co-operate with this, and the staff at Chetham’s were particularly enthusiastic. They offered to photograph anything in the library we liked the look of, to give us some magnificent images to use. One of the possibilities that arose from this discussion was that of having links to digital images of items from the Copac record, and/or thumbnails of the item on the results screen, in the same manner as the Nielsen BookData cover images. This may have to wait until the new database (see this post of Ashley’s for what else the new database might hold ), but it’s a feature that we are very enthusiastic about pursuing with our contributors.

There will be more posts coming up about the conversations we’ve been having with the Copac libraries and the issues that have arisen from them. Sign up to our feed at http://copac.ac.uk/development-blog/feed to keep up-to-date.
If you’re a Copac library that we haven’t spoken to yet, or would like to talk to us about anything, get in touch in the comments, or email copac@manchester.ac.uk. We’re always glad to hear from you.

We asked 9 of the most recently loaded libraries to respond to a short online survey, asking them about their experience of the load and update process, how useful they found the documentation, and whether they had any suggestions for improvement. We did have to emphasise that we were concerned only with the Copac side of the process; unfortunately we can’t do anything about how easy (or otherwise) libraries find it to extract data from their library management systems, although we do recognise this as a valid concern.

The results were very encouraging! Respondents were asked to rate how easy they found the load und update processes, and the vast majority replied that they found them either ‘easy or ‘very easy’, with only one library anticipating that they would find the update process difficult. Documentation was also considered very good, with one library saying that they found it ‘clear and easy to follow’.

It wasn’t all sunshine and flowers, however, as some libraries did comment that they hadn’t realised how long it would take to get the records loaded onto Copac, or how much time it would take them to extract their data. We realise that we need to do a better job of managing expectations here: while we do try to add catalogues as quickly as possible, it can sometimes take time to complete the process, and perhaps we aren’t clear enough about that.

General comments had the Copac staff blushing, as we were told that ‘support has always been excellent’, and ‘we found the process of having our records loaded easy at our end, and thank Copac staff for their help’. One library said that they were ‘just surprised how simple and straightforward the whole procedure turned out to be.’

Responses were kept anonymous, so we can’t tell who exactly we have to thank for all of this wonderful feedback, but we are very grateful for it all

If there are any libraries out there who would like to know more, or comment, please get in touch with us! We’d love to hear from existing members of the Copac community who would like to comment, or from libraries who would like to be a part of the community and would like to know more about the (very easy!) technical processes involved.