At the end of August 2022, OCLC released a completely new WorldCat.org website. It looks better on mobile, but library information is now tiered on a pay-to-play basis and links intended to keep people within WorldCat.org are prioritized over links to get the patron where they're going. In this post, I examine and analyze specific areas of concern for academic libraries.
At Penn State, we’re planning a discovery revamp which will include presenting our catalog with a Blacklight layer over the MARC records and creating a Bento landing page for the front-page search, which currently goes to Summon. We’ve been reviewing other institutions who’ve implemented such approaches, determining their choices, and assessing how they do or don’t meet our own needs.
The box causing the most conversation right now has been our Summon search. We don’t plan to serve it up in Blacklight yet, as some institutions do, although that’s on the table for the future. But, if our Summon currently contains 1,000,324,214 records1 (whereas our library’s catalog contains almost 7 million…) what should we actually be searchingwhen we’re returning those results from Summon to the Bento page.