CC-interop: a post mortem

This presentation - delivered at a Department of Computer and Information Sciences seminar - summarises the outcomes and outputs for Work Package A of the JISC funded CC-Interop project. The project involved partners from University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, London School of Economics and University of Hull, and sought to explore the feasibility of cross-searching between physical and virtual union catalogues, using COPAC and the three functioning "clumps" or virtual union catalogues (CAIRNS, InforM25, and RIDING), all funded or part-funded by JISC in recent years. The key issues investigated were technical interoperability of catalogues, use of collection level descriptions to search union catalogues dynamically, quality of standards in cataloguing and indexing practices, and usability of union catalogues for real users.