Sunday WorldCat.org 0 - discovery

This morning, I'm attending an OCLC session on WorldCat Local (a library-branded version of WorldCat.org). I haven't been live blogging much during this meeting, if you don't count concise snippets on the phone, but here goes....

Bruce Crocco started the presentation by citing the Perceptions report that indicated a decline in library search activity, noting that library service developers are effectively competing against private information and technology companies. He then drew a parallel between Amazon web services and the services that libraries need to offer: a couple of examples mentioned by the author include: single search and ratings; I would add APIs, which enable end-user extension; this will be the subject of an OCLC session that I'll be attending later (WorldCat.org platform APIs).

Crocco then described the evolution of WorldCat: From approximately five years ago, Open WorldCat integrated WorldCat content into popular search engines; WorldCat.org (which I summarized in our library tech group blog); and, WorldCat Local, which presents local, regional, and global views or levels for resource access.

Mindy Pozenel, who attended and presented at the March Alliance resource sharing meeting in Portland, followed up. She demo'd the UW catalog and noted that the meaning of the "Search Summit" button wouldn't be clear to all users, and that WCL works to streamline resource offerings. A "Delivery" slide shows a screen shot of local and consortium holdings in the UW WCL instance, as it functions now. The Summit migration, currently in progress, needs to achieve this type of functionality, or as similar as possible, in a very different environment (one in which the INN-Reach union catalog system is no longer online). This is key. Later slides in the presentation followed this pattern, one showing the three-tier location structure in a results screen. (Looking at the UC Melvyl pilot, which is probably a better analogy for consortium holdings location info than UW WCL, the results screen location presentations into the two systems look pretty much the same. At an item level, the location presentations look quite different. And, in fact, during this session, the UW WorldCat item location functionality was shown to the audience, with no qualifying information.)

Pozenel also showed examples of deploying the WorldCat.org (WCL for UW, Ohio State) search box in different environments, and the ability to access WCL from social networking services.

Pozenel also touched on the ability to bring in OAI-PMH data into the WCL discovery experience; mapping of DC to MARC is typically required. In the WSU Libs case, this would enable heavily-used digital collections, such as Early Washington Maps, to be integrated into WCL searching. (This fact underscores the importance of digital collections assessment efforts.) She also described the integration into WCL of Google Books content using the Google API.

Even though I had seen many of the slides before (three months ago), I found this presentation valuable. Clearly, new features and service ideas are being rapidly created by OCLC and early WCL adopters. One such feature is metasearch. As described in this release, OCLC is working with Index Data to integrate metasearch into the WorldCat Local discovery system.