On Wednesday, June 17, Applications Development and Support hosted a WorldCat Discovery workshop lead by Kathy Kie, Senior Training Coordinator at OCLC. The purpose of the workshop was to offer hands-on training for library faculty and staff who typically use WorldCat First Search for research, collection development and other purposes. The workshop had the added benefit of providing an opportunity for attendees to give feedback to OCLC staff while the resource is still in development.
Attendees were provided a thorough overview of WorldCat Discovery. Handouts were provided with tips for both basic and expert searching within the resource. Because Discovery is slated to replace WorldCat FirstSearch at the end of 2015, those in attendance were naturally most interested in the performance of the advanced search features.
Kathy Kie provided handouts with a list of exercises to familiarize users with how Discovery functions. For example:
- Locate a sound recording for the Marriage of Figaro. Filter the results to only display items in the eMusic format.
- Locate an article on digital preservation from the Journal of Information Science.
For those of you who are interested in learning more about WorldCat Discovery and were unable to attend the workshop, you are invited to register for the 1 hour webinar, “Ready, Set, GO: Making the move from FirstSearch to WorldCat Discovery.” This webinar takes place Thursday, July 30 starting at 2:00 pm.
You can also register to view a training session recorded in May 2015:
This OCLC Support page offers detailed information about what search by index within WorldCat Discovery:
And finally, for an overview of basic searching in WorldCat Discovery, watch this brief video:
Questions? Please contact me!
Michelle Gerry/614.688.3512
