WorldCat Discovery Services –Coming When?

OCLC has announced that their WorldCat^® Discovery Services, a new suite of cloud-based applications, will be bringing the FirstSearch^® and WorldCat^® Local (WCL) services together.  They have also announced that WorldCat Discovery Services will be available to all current FirstSearch subscribers in March 2014.  As announced earlier, however, the UC libraries will not be moving to the new service until the merge of these two separate services (FirstSearch WorldCat and WCL Melvyl) is out of beta and into production.  The earliest date this is anticipated to occur is in the latter part of 2015.

In the meantime, the UC libraries will continue using the current versions of FirstSearch and WCL.

CDL staff and the FirstSearch Resource Liaison, Bob Heyer-Gray (UC Davis), continue to monitor closely how the changes will impact our users and we are in regular communication with OCLC regarding the transition.   Two CDL staff are participating in an OCLC Advisory Group as part of OCLC’s product development for the WorldCat Local discovery features. The role of the Advisory Group is to provide feedback on OCLC’s direction and strategy and to influence the design of the interface and additional features.

Learn more: http://www.oclc.org/go/worldcat-discovery.html