WorldCat Discovery beta: Full text snippets & searching
Recent Enhancements, News, and Activities
This month’s WorldCat Discovery installation on April 13, 2015 included the following new features & enhancements.
The running list of release notes can be found at http://www.cdlib.org/services/d2d/melvyl/public/. (Note that many of these do not have an impact on Melvyl.)
- Display of Full Text Snippets. OCLC has indexed the full text of some databases in two indexes: “Keyword plus full text” (kf:) and “Full text only” (fc:). When one of those databases is selected for searching, the user can search the full text alone or with other indexes. When a full text index is searched, a full text snippet will be returned. A snippet is a maximum of 150 characters. It includes the page reference for the snippet and the total number of matches for the article. The list of databases with indexed full text can be found at https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/support/discovery/contentlisttargetID.xlsx under the “Full text collections” tab.
- Searching Full Text. Every full text database has two full text indexes: “Keyword plus full text” (kf:) and “Full text only” (fc:). You can either type the index labels in the search box, or you can choose one of the full text indexes from the drop down on Advanced Search.
- Bug fixes.
- Pagination issue resolved. OCLC has fixed a bug in WorldCat Discovery where the pagination was not always working properly in brief results and editions pages. This issue was reported by several libraries using WorldCat Discovery.
- More than one scope chosen. OCLC has resolved an issue reported by libraries choosing more than one scope and not getting search results.
WorldCat Discovery Services (WDS) Description
OCLC is working on major changes to WorldCat Local: a new discovery interface with major functional and design improvements. FirstSearch and WorldCat Local will be merged onto this new platform called WorldCat Discovery Services.
UC WDS Information on the CDL Website
Information on the WorldCat Discovery Services (Beta) for the UC campuses is available on the WorldCat Discovery Beta webpage. This webpage includes
- Links to the UC campus (and union) WCD-Beta instances where you can test drive the functionality
- OCLC’s project timeline (e.g., when will UC migrate to the new platform?)