by Nick Banitt
Quick Summary
Learn about how MNLINK's primary search program, OCLC's WorldCat Discovery (WCD), has been making changes to improve the area in the search result set called Editions & Formats.
MNLINK's primary search program, OCLC's WorldCat Discovery (WCD), has been making changes to improve the area in the search result set called Editions & Formats. That result set now aggregates similar editions of an item record in an expandable area meant to simplify the user experience. For example, the aggregation brings all audio-books of the same title and author together in one record even though the material format or narrator is different.
OCLC started to make some significant changes to Editions & Formats with the October 2018 WCD release. Clicking on the titles in the Editions & Formats now opens the record in a new browser tab. This change introduced a bug which occasionally causes an error screen which says "This search record cannot be retrieved at this time." This error can be resolved by copying the numeric value from the URL of the error screen and pasting it into the search box. That numeric value is the OCLC accession number, and all numbers in bibliographic records are indexed for searching. The bug is scheduled to be fixed in the January 2019 release.
The December 2018 WCD release brought some additional changes to Editions & Formats. The area was renamed Explore Editions and Formats in an effort to improve the visibility and clarify what the user will find. There are now also specific filter options to allow the user a streamlined result set. We expect the coming changes will continue to improve the user experience.
