WorldCat Discovery beta: Personal lists are more robust

This month’s WorldCat Discovery installation on March 10, 2016 included the following new features, enhancements and bug fixes.

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

• Personal lists are more robust. The second phase of personal lists functionality is complete with the March release. Personal lists are lists that can be saved to an account for later review. In WorldCat Discovery today lists are available to users who have a WorldCat Discovery logon (librarians with a WorldCat Discovery staff account and WorldShare Management Services [WMS] patrons).
  Personal lists are built from search results by clicking the star icon on the right side of the item description. Records are added to a temporary list during a session. To make a list permanent to be used again later, you must sign in to save the list. The image below shows 2 items on a list. The star color changes to blue once selected for the list.

OCLC has added the following functionality to personal lists in the March release:

• • Edit the name and/or description of the list
  • Add records (using Move Records function) to an existing list from a temporary list
  • Delete records from a list
  • Move multiple records to an existing list from another personal list
  • Create a personal list from selected records in a temporary list

Once in the personal list view, options for working with your list are available under the gear icon (illustrated below). When you are logged in using your WMS patron account or WorldCat Discovery staff account, more options for managing lists will be available.
Options for a signed-in user to manage personal lists:

Bug Fixes

• Facet single subcategory selection. OCLC resolved an issue where selecting a single subfacet on search results did not work properly. This change will allow users to limit results to the single subcategory and eliminate records from the result set that do not meet the subcategory criteria. Many WorldCat Discovery libraries reported this issue. The fix will allow their users to narrow results to the smaller set of items desired. Some examples where this faceting is useful are:

• • Journals with a single subcategory of eJournals
  • Newspapers and eNewspapers
  • Scoping to a single branch library from the main library

• Full text checkbox removed if not applicable. OCLC has removed the checkbox for full text in the facet area when an institution has not enabled full text, or at least one full text database is not included in the search.

WorldCat Discovery Services (WCD) 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 WCD 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?)