Skip to main content

WorldCat Discovery beta: Interface improvements

February 21, 2019 Author: Jayne DicksonCategories:

The WorldCat Discovery installation on February 20, 2019 included the following new features and enhancements.

The running list of release notes can be found at https://help.oclc.org/Discovery_and_Reference/WorldCat_Discovery/Release_notes. (Note that many of these enhancements do not have an impact on Melvyl since we are currently using WorldCat Local and are only in Preview mode for WorldCat Discovery.)

Interface Improvements

OCLC has made several small updates to the WorldCat Discovery interface based on user feedback. Label elements will now indicate the relationship between articles and journals, search results will clearly indicate when items are not held by a library or group, and pagination will be naturally centered on the search results page. These updates will improve users’ focus on metadata details and navigation through search results.

Updated label from source to journal on article citations to reflect connection between articles and journals. As an outcome of a recent usability study OCLC has updated the “Source” label that appears on article citations. This change will better reflect what metadata appears in this field to help library users understand the connection between an article and a journal. Instead of seeing “Source” as the label for journal title information, users will now see “Journal” when viewing article citations.

 

Help users understand when materials are not locally held. A “Held by other libraries worldwide” statement will appear on items that do not belong to an individual library or a library’s group. As a result of a usability study in October 2018 it was found that this statement helps the library user to determine which items are available for borrowing immediately and which need to be requested via interlibrary loan.

 

Centering pagination on search results and updated icons. Pagination on brief results will now be centered. To match current web standards, the double chevrons (<< | >>) that display on each side of pagination on brief results will now display as single chevrons (< | >).

 

Bug Fixes

Erroneous punctuation on author name corrected. WorldCat Discovery now correctly displays author names in all cases without inserting a period between first and last names. This issue affected a small set of author names.

 

WorldCat Discovery (WCD)

WorldCat Local is being replaced by a new discovery interface, WorldCat Discovery. The end of life date for WorldCat Local is August 9, 2019 at which time URLs from WorldCat Local will be redirected to WorldCat Discovery. Campuses will switchover at the end of their academic term before August 9, 2019.

Read the announcement of the switchover for details (dated February 12, 2019).

Information on WorldCat Discovery 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?)