Laura mentioned on FriendFeed that she is planning to propose a small change to her colleagues – that they remove the link to the FirstSearch interface to WorldCat and replace it with a link to WorldCat.org. Someone commented that they’d like to hear more about her proposal, so she’s posted what she believe to be compelling reasons for them to switch.
(1) The interface. Simply put, WorldCat.org looks more like Google. FirstSearch seems clunky to me, in part because I don’t think it’s changed dramatically since I was in library school seven years ago.
ok, fine, you convinced me
I just did a simple search for the same title on each and worldcat.org made it lots easier to find the book and place the ILL request.
There was a large discrepancy between search results with worldcat returning 8015 and firstsearch 5541. “Internet Resources” that matched the search words: worldcat, 771; firstsearch, 205.
I’d heard that FirstSearch had more holdings than Worldcat.org, but I guess that’s changed.