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WorldCat Discovery beta: Publicly share personal lists

July 5, 2018 Author: Jayne DicksonCategories:

The WorldCat Discovery installation on June 28, 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

Publicly share personal lists. Librarians who would like to share curated lists with patrons can now share personal lists with a shareable permalink. Any user with access to the shareable permalink can view the shared personal lists – even if the user does not have a WorldCat Discovery account.

A new privacy toggle enables list owners to choose whether a list is “Shared” or “Private” when creating or editing a personal list. When the privacy toggle is set to “Shared,” a permalink is generated for other users to view, cite and share that list. The privacy toggle is set to “Private” by default for new and existing personal lists:

The shareable permalink displays on the personal list page and can be quickly copied with the “Copy Link” action:

Anyone who has the shareable permalink can view the personal list content, e-mail it, and cite records in the list. Changes to the list, such as adding new items, are updated in real time after the page is refreshed.

List owners can toggle the privacy setting of their personal lists by changing the list status whenever needed. When a personal list privacy status changes from “Shared” to “Private”, the list content becomes automatically inaccessible to anyone with the previously generated shareable permalink.

Advanced Search page search tools expand by default. To match the search results, “Limit your search” text is now “Search Tools” and is expanded by default on the Advanced Search page. An additional “Search” action button is available to ensure the action is always visible to users.

 

 

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.