Announcements

In celebration of Open Access Week [October 24-30, 2011], OCLC is hosting a webinar on the WorldCat Digital Collection Gateway. This tool provides libraries with a way to share the metadata of their unique digital content to OCLC’s WorldCat; making your collections are more visible and discoverable by end users who search WorldCat.org, WorldCat Local and WorldCat Local "quick start", as well as Google, Yahoo! and other popular Web sites. User are able to easily click through to local library systems to access the digital item and view it immediately on their screen.

On Sunday, September 18 there will be a scheduled service downtime for the following 3 services from 1:00a.m. until at least 8:00 a.m. Eastern time. This temporary service interruption is required so we can upgrade software that supports them:

• WorldCat Basic API
• WorldCat Search API
• WorldCat Registry API

  If you have any questions about these events, please contact OCLC Support at 1-800-848-5800 (toll-free, U.S.) or +1-614-793-8682.

A new release of EZproxy, version 5.4.1 was made available 7/22/2011. This is the 6th OCLC-released version of the software. OCLC staff can get a full list of changes from the OCLC Web site at http://www.oclc.org/news/announcements/2011/announcement53.htm or read an excerpt of the announcement, below.

You may have seen the recent news release that Credo Reference is going to enable libraries to use their WorldCat Search API WSkey to display WorldCat results within the Credo Reference system. Enhancements like this one take the user one step closer to having all the possible library resources available--no matter where they start their search. It fits OCLC's strategy of putting libraries and WorldCat data where users are already going.

This past weekend we added some new enhancements to the WorldCat Search API.

New Open Digital Limit

The new Open Digital Limit is available through the SRU queries.  This limit returns records describing digital content contributed to WorldCat from open access digital repositories.  Records contain that URLs the point to the digital file.

The searchable values are:

For all your EZproxy folks--version 5.4 is here! New features added to EZproxy 5.4 include the following:

• Support for Windows 7

• A user can now submit a username or password that is longer than 32 characters or contains a "|" when using SIP Authentication

• Support signing cert 'rollover' by supporting multiple x.509 certificates in SAML metadata.

• Made changes to prevent PDF files from being treated as HTML files and improperly returned to the user.

There have been enhancements made recently to the WorldCat Registry to include new data elements. These new elements help support OCLC Web-Scale Management Services and mobile-specific functionality, including:
• There are changes to schemas and XML output for active and in-active records. The logical delete flag has moved to be an attribute within the Institution element.
• Better information about a library's online catalog including whether or not it is publically available or via an intranet only

On Sunday, February 27 there will be a scheduled service downtime for a number of OCLC services from 1:00 am until at least 6:00 am and, at most, 11:00 am (U.S. Eastern Time). We apologize for any inconvenience this causes. We need to take the following services off-line in order to upgrade the storage systems and capacity for all OCLC services. During this time, the following services will be unavailable:

Karen is far too modest to ever post out about the fact she's written another book. But she has (!) they'll be giving away copies as part of the book raffle at Code4Lib next week and if you bring your copy with you to the conference, she might even sign it for you.

The book is called Open Source Web Applications for Libraries and here's what publisher Information Today says about it:

As some of you may already have noticed, Developer Network has a redesigned website and a new web address - http://www.oclc.org/developer . The site is a ground up redesign. We've changed the technology, design, and improved the content. The redesign is intended to give you easier-to-use documentation of OCLC Web Services, as well as provide an enhanced space for developers to contribute to the growing Developer Network community.