Search "Libraries Worldwide" with Primo VE

Abstract

Change will almost always ruffle some feathers. My institution recently migrated from WorldCat Discovery to Alma/Primo VE, and we received a lot of feedback lamenting the loss of WorldCat Discovery. This wasn't just people resistant to change, the system migration disrupted users' normal workflows. As a library focused on "just in time" services, Interlibrary Loan is an essential for many of our users. Primo VE can integrate with WorldCat, but during our migration we were discouraged to implement the integration because it causes performance issues. At most the suggestion was to create a separate search option in Primo VE to just search WorldCat, yet that would similarly complicate the research workflow. In response to the volume of feedback, I began a month-long test of the API integration, and I found that the integration did not cause performance issues. This poster will share the data I collected, the methods used, and a discussion about the pros and cons of integrating the WorldCat API as part of the default search option in Primo VE.