Daily Archives: June 28, 2017

WorldCat Subscription Change

The library will be altering its OCLC WorldCat subscription beginning July 1st. This change will yield significant savings and will have minimal impact on our faculty and students. It will not affect the timing of interlibrary loan deliveries. That said, there are a couple of changes you should be aware of:

  • You will no longer have the option of submitting an interlibrary loan request directly from WorldCat. Instead, you will need to enter the citation information in ILLiad (Note: ILLiad is the name of the system we use to submit and manage interlibrary loan requests.)
  • You WILL continue to have access to WorldCat.org, but you will only see the holdings of libraries who subscribe to an OCLC product called WorldCat Discovery. A library must subscribe to WorldCat Discovery in order for its holdings to appear in the free Worldcat.org.

If you’re a frequent user of WorldCat and want to search the Discovery version, you can still do so through the Boston Public Library (BPL). The BPL offers free ecards to Massachusetts residents as well as those who “commute to a Massachusetts employer on a sustained and regular basis.” By using this free ecard, you can use Discovery to see the holdings of libraries regardless of whether they subscribe to the product. In other words, you will find holdings of institutions such as UMass Dartmouth and UMass Amherst even though these libraries don’t subscribe.

We understand that the relationship between WorldCat Discovery and WorldCat.org is confusing. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

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