[Wactclc-primo] WorldCat Discovery, FirstSearch, and ILL

[Guidry, Wade]

For those of you who were on the C1 / C2 call yesterday (8/15/2017), you may remember Dale talking about the patron-initiated ILL form Edmonds has going on in FirstSearch.

After the call, that discussion led me to think about WorldCat Local Quick Start (now branded as WorldCat Discovery).

If you're already a FirstSearch subscriber, I believe you will already have WorldCat Discovery available to you.

You would just need to have it enabled and configured on the OCLC side (http://www.oclc.org/en/worldcat-discovery/ordering.html  )

What WorldCat Local Quick Start did, and what (I think) WorldCat Discovery does, is allow you to provide a more custom, branded WorldCat interface for your patrons.

You would get a custom URL like pugetsond.worldcat.org . http://pugetsound.worldcat.org is a live example of what I'm talking about. Another is https://portlandstate.on.worldcat.org/discovery . If you go to that site, you'll see UPS's logo, the ability to search just their collection, and if you look at a specific records, you'll see that you can request an item via ILL, and you will be directed to Puget Sound's Illiad form (or, it could be a FirstSearch form, if that's what you use). So, pretty cool stuff.
 
For anyone navigating to that URL, from Primo or elsewhere, they'll get a customized version of WorldCat specifically for your institution, that includes your local, specific information about your holdings, and services such as the 'request from FirstSearch'. And, I'm guessing, as OCLC moves away from FirstSearch, the request form and process will be natively included in WorldCat Discovery. That is, if you want enable patron-initiated ILL as Edmonds does.

If you subscribe to FirstSearch already, it's certainly worth looking into. Especially if you currently, or plan on, providing a lot of ILL services to your users.

Primo is an OK starting point for ILL searches. But really, your patrons aren't going to see a whole lot in Primo that you don't already own or have access to. So, WorldCat and its variations is a good complement to Primo, for opening up searches to content that might require ILL to obtain.

In fact, if you look at the Primo instances of a lot of the Alliance libraries, you will see links to WorldCat provided in the Primo interface, and a lot of those WorldCat links go to an institutionally branded WorldCat site.

Wade Guidry
Library Consortium Services Manager
Big Bend Community College
mailto:wadeg at bigbend.edu
509.760.4474
http://www.bigbend.edu 
Big Bend Community College * 7662 Chanute Street NE * Moses Lake, WA 98837-3299