Are there any librarians who use WorldCat Local?

[Patrick]

We are trying to get a sense of what products are popular with librarians, and one of the products mentioned is WorldCat's Local product. We have had our reviews on WorldCat.org for awhile now, but we are interested in gauging how many libraries use the local product instead. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

[Benjamin]

Do you mean the second website? Because I only use the main page.

[Catherine]

Our library has WorldCat Local, but we don't use it much. Though we have let our patrons know it exists, I don't think patrons use WorldCat too much. My favorite feature is that it shows which items we've added holdings for in the previous month.

But does WorldCat Local affect whether GoodReads reviews show? As far as I can tell, it's the same interface, except you also have an informational page for your library, and when you find a book that's in your library, it links you to that book in your own catalog (like the library links in GoodReads).

[Benjamin]

Catherine wrote: "Our library has WorldCat Local, but we don't use it much. Though we have let our patrons know it exists, I don't think patrons use WorldCat too much. My favorite feature is that it shows which it..."

Do you mean the blog?

[Catherine]

Benjamin wrote: "Do you mean the blog?"

I mean the page that looks, for example, like this: http://www.worldcat.org/libraries/12241. (Just to be clear, I'm a patron of KCPL, not an employee.) It's a good way we can inform our patrons about our new items, without doing any more work than providing them with a URL. (But it has nothing to do with GoodReads!)

This morning I compared results from searches using the WorldCat Local and WorldCat.org interfaces. WorldCat, weRead, and GoodReads user reviews display in both (for the item I looked at). The only relevant difference is that in WorldCat.org, there's a line at the bottom of the main bibliographic info display (I mean the one at the top, to the right of the book cover) for "Rating," which shows the average star rating and number of reviews (ONLY including WorldCat ratings and reviews), with a link to the review section below. Frankly, I'd rather do without that because I think the number of reviews is misleading and because we're an academic library: an average star rating from the general public is not a good indication of whether a work is scholarly.

Edited to add: One example of a WorldCat Local interface is Ohio State University's at osu.worldcat.org. It can be searched as a guest for catalog (and not database) results only.