I write this after a traumatic experience. Yesterday, through force of circumstances, I had to use the new WorldCat interface to demonstrate research techniques, and the experience wounded me.

Some background: I teach a library school course called Introduction to Sources and Services in the Arts and Humanities, and one focus of the course is to prepare students to provide research consultations to advanced undergraduate students in the humanities. I teach a method that I have used myself for many years, and that has generally proven worthwhile.

Students working on research essays in the humanities should try to find, and ideally enter, scholarly conversations on the topics of their research. The idea of “scholarship as conversation” became on of the “threshold concepts” in last year’s ACRL Framework for Information Literacy, but I’ve been using the metaphor for a long time because it’s useful. Advanced scholars in a field are already familiar with relevant conversations, but students have to find a way to get there, and one way to do that is through searching relevant databases and catalogs.

Searching itself isn’t particularly difficult, and simply finding sources for a research essay is one of the easier tasks in the research and writing of one. Nevertheless, students sometimes have problems, and one of the problems is knowing what they’re searching for. They believe at first that they’re searching for any sources on their topic, but that search can be very extensive. In the humanities, they should be searching for what Rebecca Green calls “seed documents.”*

A seed document is one that helps students find that conversation. Ideally, it should be a recent book (or 2 or 3) in English from a scholarly press as relevant as possible to the research topic, and preferably one discovered through a variety of means. Thus, if the same book or two is discovered through a catalog search, a subject index search, and in the bibliography of an article in a subject-specific scholarly encyclopedia, it’s probably a source the student needs. After finding a handful of sources like that, it’s time to stop searching and to start reading and chasing footnotes. In that process, students are more likely to find the relevant scholarly conversation as they see scholars citing other scholars in dialog with them.

Generally, I suggest the triple approach of index, encyclopedia, and WorldCat (so as not to limit the search to what happens to be in one particular library). For literature, which was the discipline yesterday, I would suggest the MLA Bibliography and the Literature Resource Center in addition to WorldCat. For WorldCat and other databases, I suggest a series of steps:

1. Search relevant keywords
2. Locate the most relevant book to your topic
3. Find the subject heading(s)
4. Search the subject heading(s)
5. Sort by date-newest
6. Find the most recent relevant books from scholarly presses
7. Go get them and start reading

There’s nothing fancy or earth-shattering about the process, but it’s simple and it often works. However, it works a lot faster in the old, and eventually to be discontinued, version of WorldCat than in the new version, because in the old version one can get a list of 100 results instead of just ten, and–most importantly–one can see the publisher information at a glance. Here’s what a typical result looks like:

In the new version of WorldCat that I had to use because that’s what the library school students had available, the same record looks like this:

You can’t see the publisher information until first clicking on the title, and THEN on the “Description.” Instead of being able to see publisher information immediately, it takes two clicks from the results list. Also, unless I missed something (and if I did please correct me), the results list can’t be expanded beyond 10 results.

That means instead of being able to scan a long list quickly looking for relevant titles from scholarly publishers, researchers would have to:

1. Click on the title in the results list (which then moves to a frame on the left)
2. Click on the Description of the book to see the publisher information
3. Click to go to the next screen of ten (which returns to the initial results list format)
4. Click on another title (which then moves to the left frame again)
5. Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat, Repeat.

Clicking is always slower than scrolling, and some people prefer clicking to scrolling. Those people should love the new WorldCat, because not only can’t you scroll more than ten results (in the version I used), but you have to click twice as often to see the full citation. WorldCat.org does allow one to see the full citation (at least for now), but is also limited to ten records at a time. Still, that’s better than the new WorldCat.

Several months ago, representatives from OCLC visited my library to demo this, and the response from the entire group of librarians was negative. Everyone used WorldCat for different tasks, and for every task for which people normally relied on WorldCat the new WorldCat made that task either more difficult or impossible. If the new WorldCat doesn’t fix what I consider to be a serious problem, it will go from the research tool of first resort for upper level students in the humanities to a useless tool of no resort, which would be a pity because there’s nothing comparable to replace it.

*Green, Rebecca. “Locating Sources in Humanities Scholarship: The Efficacy of Following Bibliographic References.” The Library Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2000): 201–29.