WorldCat Discovery beta: Email Improvements

April 24, 2018 Author: Jayne DicksonCategories:

The WorldCat Discovery installation on March 29, 2018 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.)
New Features and Enhancements
Email multiple recipients with subject lines and contextual messages. Users can email a record, personal lists, or their “My Items” to multiple email addresses. Up to five email address can be entered at once, and emails must be valid and comma delimited.
Users can include a subject line and a brief message up to 500 characters with each email:

Bug fixes
956 ERIC links now display. Previously, 956 ERIC links did not display in WorldCat Discovery.
Group related editions check box persists from search to search. Previously, the “Group related editions” search tool would unexpectedly disable in some cases. This option will now persist in all cases as expected.

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.