WCL Gains and Losses vs. Voyager

spelling corrections

Some misspellings are handled gracefully. Example: "No results match your search for 'shakesperre'. Did you mean shakespeare"?

initial article searches work

No more 0 hits when a patron searches for a title and include "the" or "an" or "a".

integration of Voyager, Borrow Direct, and WorldCat collections into a seamless delivery system

WCL is a major leap forward in reducing the number of unique discovery platforms our patrons are required to search.

lists

Greatly improved functionality over the Voyager book bag

personalization features

WCL allows the patron to tag and review items and easily integrate them into other popular services such as Facebook and De.licio.us

integration with Amazon

Seamless integration with buying options in Amazon. The current implementation is flawed, however, in that it produces links to Amazon when they should not be present. For example, manuscript holdings also display a link to Amazon. OCLC is actively working to improve the buy options in WCL.

integration with Google books

Very, very nice. Seamless integration with Google Books. When a book is available in Google, WCL displays a "Google Preview" button.

cover art

Nice, Amazon-like integration of cover art.

facets

Facets bring out more of the metadata.

user centered design, modern user interface

Makes it easy to move from the open Web into WCL and back out to other systems like Amazon and Google books.

simple search box

Easy and forgiving.

includes reviews from Amazon and other sources

Reviews are pulled in and integrated into the record display

includes table of contents

Table of contents links are clearly distinguished from links to the full text.

eserials holdings are not complete

OCLC and Serials Solutions are having discussions about how to better transfer our eserials holdings. Right now all titles with an ISSN that OCLC can match are represented in WCL. This includes the top 20,000 titles.

no

yes

no unit location limit

We are working with OCLC to implement "Local Holdings Records". After we load our local holdings OCLC will add a feature to allow patrons and staff to restrict results to a given campus library branch.

no

yes

rare and manuscript copy specific information is absent

OCLC is working on adding copy specific information to WorldCat as part of their Local Holdings records project. There has been some progress along these lines. OCLC will now accept updates to records for unique manuscript collections in batch.

no

maybe

no call number searching or browsing

OCLC has stated no plans to make these features available. (Perhaps they will reconsider after they get their Local Holdings Records project off the ground.)

no

no

current serial issues do not display

The "recent issues" data in our public catalog is being pulled from the acquisitions client's serials check-in record.  Because it's not bibliographic data in a format OCLC's systems can capture, the information remains in Voyager exclusively. 

The only workaround would be to manually enter enumeration and chronology information from each issue received into the MARC holdings of each title's bib record.  That would be a laborious and error-prone process.  It would also complicate our ability to claim missing issues (unless we continued Voyager check-in and also did the manual updates to the holdings--duplicate work).  To ensure up-to-date check-in data from holdings records, we would also have to export the updated holdings records daily to OCLC, something neither we nor they are currently prepared to handle.

yes

no

uniform title searching only partially implemented

We have been unable to get a clear answer about how uniform title searching is implemented in WCL ["The uniform title identifies an item if it has appeared under varying titles"]. We know that searching for Law and Music items by uniform title is difficult right now.

no

Probably. OCLC seems now to recognize that there is a problem because they have heard this complaint from several libraries.

left anchored searching absent

This is perhaps linked to the problems we are having trying to search on uniform titles.  It is a conscious design decision on OCLC's part.

no

no

it is not possible to scan availability across a result set

Given that WCL retrieves circ status when the full record is displayed, there is no scalable way to show the circ status for an entire result set

no

no

some proprietary ebook record sets are not in WorldCat due to licensing restrictions

Our latest estimate is that there are some 107,000 titles missing. OCLC is working on these, but the pace is slow. The new Springer ebooks are not represented, for example.

no

yes