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WorldCat Discovery beta: Most recent records display first

February 22, 2017 Author: Jayne DicksonCategories:

 

This month’s WorldCat Discovery installation on February 16, 2017 included the following new features and enhancements.

The running list of release notes can be found at http://www.oclc.org/support/services/discovery/release-notes.en.html. (Note that many of these do not have an impact on Melvyl.)

New Features and Enhancements

Record for most recent, locally-held edition now displays in search results. When multiple editions of an item are available, the most recent, locally-held edition now displays in search results. Users can choose to view additional editions as needed. This change from displaying the record with the most WorldCat holdings is in response to user feedback about their preferences for finding editions.

Learn more about our approach to clustering [PDF], the process that pulls similar editions and formats into a group or cluster.

The former approach to surfacing items with multiple editions was:

 


Now, the record that displays represents more recent publications available from your library:

 

 

This change is illustrated below for results from the search “ideals varieties and algorithms.” As you can see, this library owns multiple copies. There is an older edition with many holdings attached to its WorldCat record and a more recent edition with fewer holdings attached to the WorldCat record.

With this month’s change, the more recent 2015 edition displays 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.