Copac Developments

If you’re not familiar with the holdings of the University of Exeter, you may be slightly confused by the title of this post. Exeter holds, in its Special Collections, Middle East Collections, and Arab World Documentation Centre, a significant collection of resources on the Arabian peninsula and Middle East, including over 15,000 books in Arabic.

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!

One of the major assets of the Copac libraries is their collection of pre-1801 works. A (very rough) search on Copac, limiting the date to 1000-1800 returns 4.3 million results, which represents 1/8 of Copac’s total number of records. Even allowing for a 10% erroneous return rate, that is an awful lot of books. And, in this case, it is actual items, rather than works, expressions or manifestations (to borrow from FRBR ), as Copac doesn’t de-duplicate pre-1801 materials.

You may wonder why. With early published material, it can be very difficult to establish whether items are the same work, let alone expression or manifestations. Titles were often not uniform, and even titles that appear uniform can disguise differences in content. A slight difference in title or publication details can indicate a range of scenarios – from exactly the same content with a typo on the title page, to entirely different content. The ISBD(A) recognises this, and says in the introduction that

The aim of the rare book librarian here is not only description of an antique, but, more important, the clarification of the transmission of the text and the “points” which distinguish editions
[ISBD(A):  International Standard Bibliographic Description for Older Monographic Publications (Antiquarian)
Second revised edition <http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/pubs/isbda.htm>]

It is not just differences in the official content of the book that make items unique.   Librarians hate people writing in books. It stirs some primeval anger – unless, of course, the person doing the writing is famous. Or dead. Preferably both. Many antiquarian books contain annotations and additions that make all the difference for researchers. What makes this Chetham’s Library copy of Serrani’s Plato different from others? Well, it could be former owner Ben Jonson’s name on the title page…  (which excited me and Lisa very much when we visited!).

Libraries indicate the presence of these in local notes fields in their catalogue record, and Copac preserves, displays, and indexes these local notes. This means that all of the effort that librarians put into creating this valuable information directly affects the finadability of an item.

A fantastic example of this high-quality cataloguing is that of the playbills collection held at York Minster. Librarian John Powell is including details of all plays and actors mentioned on the bills, building up a fantastic picture of eighteenth and nineteenth century theatre. A Copac search for ‘Theatre Royal York’, limited to ‘York Minster’ shows the level of detail being added. When I spoke to John recently, he highlighted how crucial this level of detail was for the resources to be used to their fullest potential. Having such a collection, catalogued with such care, and available for discovery on Copac, is a real asset to the research community.

While I’m getting to know the collections in the Copac community better as time goes on, the people who know them best are the librarians who look after them.  By talking to these librarians, I’m learning more about the collections, and how best to promote use of them. Stay tuned for future thoughts.
PS You may also be wondering why 1801 is chosen as the cut-off date for antiquarian books. So was I!  The answer lies in the industrial revolution, and the invention of printing presses that were machine-, rather than man-powered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#The_Industrial_Revolution (yes, yes, I know… if you have a more authoritative source, please feel free to add it to the comments.)

As part of the work we’ve been doing on the future of the Challenge Fund (watch this space!), I’ve been talking to some of the Challenge Fund libraries about their experiences with Copac, and the benefits they’ve felt from being part of the Copac community.

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.