Thanks so much for sharing that. Sounds like there won’t be an announcement about the release date until mid-September. Is anyone in CUNY thinking of signing up to beta test the new interface? Details here:
http://registration.oclc.org/reg/?pc=firstsearchbeta
One thing that I don’t get is what all this means for WorldCat Local and WorldCat.org. Will they get overhauled with the exact same interface? Something different?
For the benefit of others, here’s a link to the part of the video where they really get started talking about the interface (that 5:50 mark that Stephen Klein mentioned):
http://youtu.be/WLMGJ4eMefw?t=5m50s
This section of the video nicely sums up the features and benefits of the new interface:
http://youtu.be/WLMGJ4eMefw?t=11m53s
Until I watched this video, I had been thinking that we’d swap out our link to FirstSearch WorldCat on our databases page and replace it with a link to the free version at WorldCat.org, something that our users might have actually stumbled onto on their own and something that has a much cleaner interface than the FirstSearch one. But now, with this new interface coming for FirstSearch, I’m wondering if we should wait to see how it works for us before deciding to swap the link to WorldCat.org. Any thoughts about this?