The British (and Irish) Are Coming

Thanks to the efforts of the University of Manchester Computing department, the new XML trial version of the online public access catalog Copac is now Zotero-compatible. Containing over 30 million records, this tremendous resource provides free access to the merged online catalogs of major UK and Irish university research libraries, plus the British Library and the National Library of Scotland.

Copac offers an excellent model for other data providers, self-publishers, and bloggers who wish to make their content available to Zotero. By embedding COinS tags in their library records, the Copac developers have made it possible for Zotero to automatically capture the bibliographic information contained in them. The Copac XML database can be accessed via the Copac v3 experimental interface, which is scheduled to go live on March 28.