Category Archives: OCLC

WRS changes in need-by-date and reasons-for-no

OCLC recently implemented a fix to correct problems users have been reporting with inaccurate lender string histories and incorrect reasons for no reports. Rather than report incorrect request histories, we are no longer carrying over the history from an unfilled request when a new request is created. We are pursuing a permanent fix to this problem that will display correct request histories.

In order for your institution to track lender histories of unfilled requests, you will have to retain the request ID number of the unfilled request and search for it as a completed request. In the coming months we will introduce the ability to search the completed request archive by other search elements including bibliographic data fields and patron data fields.

From a technical standpoint once a record is resent with new lenders it is considered a “new” request.

A related issue has been the “Need by date” not being carried over to the “new” request. With the next install cycle the need before date will be appear on the new request and will be the same date as the original request.

Thank you for all of your comments and concerns about workflow issues and hopefully they will be solved within the next couple of months as we continually improve the service.

Thank you

Christa Starck Weiker

Product Manager, WorldCat Resource Sharing

Building a community of WorldCat users

WorldCat.org adds user profiles and the ability to build and share lists

WorldCat.org now offers personal profiles—My WorldCat Accounts—along with a social-networking feature: users across the Web can add individual items cataloged in WorldCat to personalized lists. Users can build as many lists as they like on any subject. They can group items owned by their library and other WorldCat libraries, and share their lists with friends, colleagues and millions of site users. All they need is an e-mail address to create a free WorldCat account.

In addition, My WorldCat accounts allow users to create online profiles to provide greater detail about their interests and occupations and link to personal Web pages, RSS feeds or instant messaging addresses. Providing this personal information is optional, and users can control the public availability of their e-mail addresses or their entire profiles in the privacy settings for their accounts.

New World Wide ILL wiki

This was posted on ILL-L listserv June 18, 2007:

We are pleased to introduce ShareILL (pronounced like the woman’s name “Cheryl”), a new wiki devoted to all aspects of ILL and resource sharing, http://www.shareill.org. You might notice that the content looks more like a tarted up web site than Wikipedia, but that’s because we just wanted to get the basic infrastructure in place so that you (yes, we mean YOU) can contribute the sort of content that will be helpful to you and your ILL colleagues around the world. Just go to www.shareill.org, create an account, and start writing your wiki entry.


Maybe you want to write about ILL copyright tracking, or performance standards, or how ILL works in your country/state/province/region. Maybe you’re the resident expert on German copyright law and ILL, or you’ve been involved in some innovative ILL project, or you want to write about the convergence between ILL, acquisitions, and collection development. Create your ShareILL account, and start writing! We want this to be a truly grass roots effort for the entire global resource sharing community, sort of “Wikipedia meets ILL”, so that means anyone can create and/or edit any of the ShareILL pages.

Remember: like ILL itself, ShareILL can only be successful if we all pitch in and share our expertise, so start writing!

See you on the wiki,

Linda Frederiksen
frederik@vancouver.wsu.edu

Mary Hollerich
mary.hollerich@gmail.com

***CLIO Connection Problem with OCLC****

Posted 6/14/2007

Larry Perkins from Clio Software posted this message to the Clio listserv:

The oclc communications problem has been traced to a networking hardware/software change made at oclc over the Memorial Day weekend.

This should not have affected us since our software is compliant with all relevant standards and the oclc protocol. However, it did.

At this point, we and oclc are determining the best course of action. It may be faster for us to make a change.

We will decide shortly.

Larry Perkins