As Copac has expanded its database to over 34 million records, and now averages over 2 million searches a month, we need to make big changes to the service. Here's what we plan to do over the coming year, with new funding from JISC…

Copac offers researchers free online access to the catalogues of the UK's major research libraries. In recent years, this coverage has grown significantly, beyond the pivotal member institutions of Research Libraries UK (RLUK), to include more materials in museums, scholarly societies and university special collections.

These collections are rare and underused, held in places such as The Natural History Museum and Lambeth Palace. The British Library, RLUK and the Research Information Network (RIN) funded this critical expansion, but to accommodate Copac's continued growth, we need a more agile and adaptable system.

Enhancing the user experience

Over the next year, we'll be carrying out work to overhaul the Copac service and enhance the user experience by introducing more powerful search and personalisation tools.

We expect these changes to bring three main benefits:

1. faster, more effective searches – with a more responsive database
2. easier search-related tasks – with a more flexible system that lets you narrow or broaden searches and personalise or share content
3. access to more collections – with a database that can hold more content

The first phase: Project iCue

We're calling this first investigatory phase 'Project iCue' (Improving the Copac user experience). We want to dig deep to identify where and how we can improve the Copac infrastructure to make our users' experience as fruitful, efficient and enjoyable as possible. We'll be redesigning Copac's user interface, paying particular attention to usability and ease of navigation.

The sheer size of the database and current system means searches can return large and, at times, unwieldy result sets, making it difficult for users to find what they need. We'll address this is a major priority – and as we work on it, we'll be drawing from the recommendations of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) usability report – one we recently commissioned.

The research

To undertake this research, we're partnering with Mark Van Harmelen of Hedtek Ltd, and benefiting from his research for the JISC TILE project.

We believe there's a lot of valuable overlap between these projects, especially in relation to developments at the University of Huddersfield, where circulation data is being used to suggest or recommend items to users.

Also, we look forward to drawing on the expertise of OPAC 2.0 specialists, such as Dave Pattern, who are pioneering in this area. And of course, we'll be working closely with users (librarians and researchers) to assess our developments.

Tackling FRBR

Developing the user interface will mean a radically new structure for the Copac database. As a starting point, we'll be working with Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and determining what we might implement or adapt from a database model – marking a real paradigm-shift for bibliographic standards.

This is relatively uncharted terrain, especially in the UK, and we anticipate learning a great deal in these early investigative phases of the project. We look forward to sharing this knowledge, and plan to keep the library development community posted through our Copac Developments Blog.

A challenging year ahead

We're proud of what the Copac service has achieved so far, but now look forward to transforming the way it works, to meet the rapidly changing needs of ever-increasing numbers of users.