Joint Press Release from the British Library and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL)
The British Library and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) are delighted to announce that from 17 June 2002 the British Library Public Catalogue (BLPC) will be accessible online, free of charge, from COPAC.
COPAC is an online union catalogue, hosted at MIMAS, which gives free access to the merged catalogues of 22 of the largest university research libraries in the UK and Ireland. Now that the British Library has become a full member of CURL and the BLPC has been added to COPAC, COPAC users will have free online access, via a single search interface, to more than 20 million catalogue records, which they can search simultaneously by title, author or subject.
The National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales / Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru have also become full members of CURL and their records will be available via COPAC within the next twelve months. Meanwhile their catalogues can be searched simultaneously with the COPAC database, which also includes the BLPC, using the experimental version COPAC V3.
More details about the content of the BLPC are available.
More information about CURL and MIMAS can be found on their respective web sites.
