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COPAC is the new OPAC providing a unified interface to the consolidated database of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL). This paper provides a brief overview of the background to CURL and the COPAC project, describing the main content of the COPAC database. Having multiple contributors to the database inevitably results in some record duplication. Deduplication and record consolidation are being carried out in the production of the COPAC database and the general procedures involved are described. COPAC is accessible via a Text interface and a Web interface. Each interface is discussed using example screens to illustrate the search process. Now that the initial COPAC service is in operation, further developments are taking place across several fronts and these are described briefly.

Experimental evidence suggests that enhancing the subject content of OPAC records can improve retrieval performance. This is based on the use of natural language index terms derived from the table of contents and back‐of‐the‐book index of documents. The research reported here investigates the alternative approach of translating these natural language terms into controlled vocabulary. Subject queries were collected by interview at the catalogue, and indexing of the queries demonstrated the impressive ability of PRECIS, and to a lesser extent LCSH, to represent users' information needs. DDC performed poorly in this respect. The assumption was made that an index language adequately specific to represent users' queries should be adequate to represent document contents. Searches were carried out on three test databases, and both natural language and PRECIS enhancement of MARC records increased the number of relevant documents found, with PRECIS showing the better performance. However, with weak stemming the advantage of PRECIS was lost. Consideration must also be given to the potential advantages of controlled vocabulary, over and above basic retrieval performance measures.

Having been around in one form or another for some years, decades almost, the term OPAC and the corresponding concept will be familiar to most librarians/information workers. The earliest OPACs can probably be ascribed to the first true online circulation systems, heralded by the arrival of Geac in the United Kingdom around 1980. Prior to that time the quantity of bibliographic information held for the purposes of circulation control ranged from inadequate to non‐existent.

Automating for the first time, Isle College chose IME's TINlib library management system on the evidence of its ease of use for end‐users. After almost six months of live use a questionnaire was distributed to student and staff users of the OPAC in order to assess the effectiveness of the system and its user friendliness; a series of face‐to‐face interviews supplemented the questionnaire data. The results showed a substantial increase in borrowing since automation and gave some pointers as to how the effectiveness of the system could be improved still further.

THE greatly increased interest in historical studies since the second world war has been, I hope, a welcome challenge to librarians, but it has been very difficult to meet it. That the librarians of our new universities should have had little research material to offer was only to be expected. Unfortunately, research scholars have discovered that our older libraries were also deficient, that source materials had either not been purchased, in the years when they were readily available, or had been acquired only to be discarded at a later date. Recently, therefore, both old libraries and new have found themselves in competition for a small and dwindling supply of out‐of‐print publications.

AFTER more than thirty‐three years THE LIBRARY WORLD appears in a new and, we hope our readers will agree, more attractive form. In making such a change the oldest of the independent British library journals is only following the precedent of practically all its contemporaries. The new age is impatient with long‐standing patterns in typography and in page sizes, and all crafts progress by such experiments as we are making. Our new form lends itself better than the old to illustration; we have selected a paper designed for that purpose, and illustrated articles will therefore be a feature of our issues. We shall continue as in the past to urge progress in every department of the library field by the admission of any matter which seems to have living interest for the body of librarians.