The DeWitt Wallace Library is excited to join a select group of libraries across the country making available the new WorldCat Local discovery tool. This library service will help Macalester students, faculty and staff more easily locate and obtain library items needed for their research - not only within our local collections and those of other CLIC libraries, but also thousands of libraries around the world. Macalester is joining such libraries as the University of Washington, Cornell University, the University of California libraries and Ohio State University in piloting this new service.
Macalester WorldCat allows us to offer customizations that will help further enhance OCLC's popular WorldCat service specifically for Macalester users. These customizations include providing tiered search results with locally-owned materials displayed first followed by the holdings of other libraries within the region and worldwide.
It will also provide real time availability status of materials through a connection to CLICnet, informing users as to whether locally-owned materials are checked in and available and, if not, allowing users to easily place a hold or an interlibrary loan request for the item.
Users can seamlessly connect to many of the other resources and services that the library makes available to our users using Macalester WorldCat. The inclusion of the MacLinks/SFX button allows users to access full-text articles when available through resources to which we subscribe. The “Cite this Resource” feature connects directly with RefWorks.
With Macalester WorldCat, our library users will be able to access library materials easily through a new search box that will display on the library Web site. For those that want to search CLICnet or MnCat directly, links to these catalogs will be available immediately below the main search box.
The library is very interested in getting comments from the campus community as we work with OCLC in impacting the further development of this product. A comment form is available both on the library's web page and also from within Macalester WorldCat.
