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WorldCat Discovery beta: New cover art image for articles

June 22, 2016 Author: Jayne DicksonCategories:

 

wds
This month’s WorldCat Discovery installation on June 26, 2016 included the following new features and 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.)

New Features and Enhancements

  • New cover art image for articles. OCLC has added a default cover art image for article items in search results to improve the display. In the future, OCLC will add default cover art for other item types. The default cover art will display when cover art is not otherwise available.

cover_art

  • Display full title in search results. For responsive design usability, the WorldCat Discovery interface previously truncated titles in search results to one line and appended ellipsis on long titles. Based on feedback from WorldCat Discovery librarians, results now display full titles so users can more clearly see the relevance of the search results.
  • Improved error message. The error message, “this item has been removed or does not exist” has been replaced by a more user-friendly message, “this search record cannot be retrieved at this time”. This error message displays when an unauthenticated user attempts to link to restricted content.

 

WorldCat Discovery (WCD)

OCLC is working on major changes to WorldCat Local: a new discovery interface with major functional and design improvements. WorldCat Local will be replaced by a new platform called WorldCat Discovery.
Information on the WorldCat Discovery (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?)

FirstSearch

In March 2016, OCLC announced it was keeping FirstSearch as a separate product rather than merging it into WorldCat Discovery as originally planned. We do not yet have a timeline for the new FirstSearch beta.