I mentioned on FriendFeed that I am planning to propose a small change to my colleagues – that we remove the link to the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat and replace it with a link to WorldCat.org. Someone commented that they’d like to hear more about my proposal, so I thought I’d post what I believe to be compelling reasons for us to switch…
(1) The interface. Simply put, WorldCat.org looks more like Google. FirstSearch seems clunky to me, in part because I don’t think it’s changed dramatically since I was in library school seven years ago.
(2) From what I can tell, you do not lose any search functionality in WorldCat.org. You can still limit your search by audience, year, language, format, and so forth.
(3) From what I can tell, you don’t lose any other type functionality, either. You can still print, save, and export records. Our link resolver works with WorldCat.org, as well.
(4) Here are some features that the FirstSearch interface doesn’t appear to have:
- Persistent URLs for records
- The ability to choose whether it’s more important to have the work in general, or a specific edition of that work, and locate them at nearby libraries
- Automatically created citations in the most popular styles (APA, MLA, etc.)
- Reviews are incorporated from a variety of sources (including Amazon)
- Users may create persistent lists (unlikely the seemingly session-based lists of the FirstSearch interface). These lists may be public or private; they may be downloaded to Excel as .csv files; they can be exported to bibliographic management software.
- Users are also shown where they can buy items
If you have other reasons you think users would like WorldCat.org better than the FirstSearch interface, I’d love to hear them – and of course, I’m curious to know if you think there are good reasons to stay with the FirstSearch interface as well.
Worldcat.org will generally display a link to firstsearch if one is on a recognized IP address (i.e. using a library computer). So patrons will still have access to it. Firstsearch does display some fields that worldcat.org doesn’t display (like the biographical/administrative note for archival records).
That being said, I think worldcat.org is more intuitive, and more easy to navigate for the novice. It’s functionality (like lists, and user profiles) is wonderful. In many ways, I see it as the future of the catalog.
The only thing that was holding us back from switching from FirstSearch to worldcat.org was the ability to request a book through ILL from within the database. Maybe you could always do this in worldcat.org and we just never realized it, but you CAN do it now, so we’re almost certainly going to switch when we launch our website redesign in August.
The ILL request takes you into the FirstSearch interface (I think it’s in a frame within the page) temporarily, but there’s a really obvious link back to the worldcat.org record for the book.
As for reasons to stay with the FirstSearch interface: How about, “because librarians geek out over it”?
I had been under the impression that Worldcat.org only had a subset of libraries’ holdings. I thought it was those that subscribe to the Worldcat Firstsearch services. That was from when Worldcat.org was first started. Does anyone know if that has changed?
I would love to see us switch to the Worldcat.org interface. When worldcat.org first came out, several librarians raised objections that some of the search parameters weren’t available with worldcat.org. Even if this is still the case, I would argue that most of these advanced features aren’t very useful to our students anyway.
WorldCat.org is certainly a far superior product over FirstSearch – except for one thing. A searcher can not immediately discern which titles are owned by the local library. I often tell students to search WorldCat (FS) instead of our local interface because it 1) shows what we own, and 2) it shows everything else in the world on the topic. WorldCat.org does show if we own an item, but you need to click on each title to find out.