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WorldCat Discovery beta: High res cover art & aligned titles

January 25, 2019 Author: Jayne DicksonCategories:

The WorldCat Discovery installation on January 18, 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.)

New Features and Enhancements

Quickly browse search results with high resolution cover art and aligned titles. Several improvements to the WorldCat Discovery interface will help improve the overall look and feel of WorldCat Discovery, especially on mobile devices:

  • Larger cover art images
  • Improved alignment of title metadata on brief results
  • Cover art display on brief results of mobile views
  • Icon display for browsers and bookmarking on mobile and desktop

Cover Art 

To help users identify materials, WorldCat Discovery displays higher resolution images. Cover art improvements will display automatically for all users on desktop, mobile and tablet views of WorldCat Discovery. No configuration is required. Larger cover art displays on search results and detailed views. In addition to the larger cover art images, title metadata displays in line with all of the search result metadata.

Example of cover art on search results and text alignment:

Example of mobile view display:

 

Improved icon images for shortcuts and bookmarks. To help users identify and access WorldCat Discovery, WorldCat Discovery now provides icons that save to mobile devices, tablets, and desktops. This icon appears in browser tabs automatically and appears automatically as an icon when WorldCat Discovery is saved to a mobile or tablet devices as a shortcut. Display of the icon will require some configuration to display on desktop devices.

Example of icon display in browser tab:


Bug Fixes

Consistently link to titles from Editions and Formats in WorldCat Discovery detailed record views. Some users may have encountered the error message, “The search record cannot be retrieved at this time” when clicking through linked titles on the Edition and Formats section of WorldCat Discovery detailed records. This issue has been corrected.

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. In July 2018, OCLC visually updated the interface to display “an updated, more contemporary look.” The changes are limited to a restyling of the new interface and do not affect functionality, navigation or site structure.