Noticed a change on our homepage?
The Dalhousie Libraries have acquired WorldCat Local, a new discovery tool which provides expanded Web access to local, regional and worldwide library resources. When you do a search, items available at Dal are shown at the top of the search results, followed by items held in Novanet Libraries, Atlantic University Libraries and finally libraries around the world.
WorldCat Local provides a single interface for searching books, articles, digital items and other materials, as well as document delivery options. Other attractive features include relevancy ranking, book cover images, downloading digital content, and the ability create lists, RSS feeds, saved searches and more. Plus you can use it on your handheld!
Please note that WorldCat Local is an enhancement to Novanet, which will continue to be used for patron account functions, placing holds, Novanet Express, and Reserves.
We’re beta testing this exciting new tool and welcome your feedback on it. Please give it a try at www.library.dal.ca and let us know what you think!
Cool. This is really slick. I like being able to look at the book cover, and there are a lot of new controls. Novanet’s interface is very clunky and old by comparison.
I saw the search bar on the library webpage but did not click on it. This was due to the way it was advertised. Because you’re (or maybe it’s worldCat Local who are) branding it as “Think Local, Search Global”, I assumed it was something for IDS students, i.e. “Think Global act Local”, and not something I would actually use.
This service isn’t useful in that you can search libraries around the world, but that it is an alternative to using the Novanet interface. You may get more hits to this service if you advertise it as such. Also, the stock art image accompanying this blog post does nothing for clarification. You should also do more to advertise the direct link to this service (dal.worldcat.org)
Catherine, thanks for taking the time to comment, we really appreciate it! This is just the “soft launch” of WorldCat Local–we’ll be doing much more promotion in the fall when various behind-the-scenes technical issues have been fixed (we hope!). At that point we’ll be advertising a whole new interface as well as placing the actual search box from WorldCat much more prominently on our homepage. But you’re certainly making us rethink the “Think local. Search global” tagline, hmmm…
Thanks again for your feedback!
@Catherine, thanks for sharing the direct link to the worldcat service site, “http://www.dal.worldcat.org/”
And I agree, a little advertising of that link would do more good for us students here at dal.