OCLC WorldCat Discovery: Home

You can click here to open the OCLC Community Center and upvote an enhancement to make the remote database option workable for OpenAthens.

You can click here to open the OCLC Community Center and upvote an enhancement to make the remote database preview tray customizable.

When your campus IT department renews or replaces the SAML security certificate for the campus login system (Identity Provider/IdP), OCLC services like WMS, Discovery, and ILL need to recognize the new certificate. Without this update, library staff and patrons may be unable to sign in through single sign-on (SSO).

Here’s what to do:

• Send OCLC Support the updated IdP metadata, and note the expiration date of the old certificate. You can use the Zendesk portal, available for login or account setup at https://help.oclc.org/Librarian_Toolbox/Contact_OCLC_Support, or email OCLC Support at support@oclc.org.

• If your library uses EZproxy: your EZproxy server will also need updates. See OCLC documentation:

  • Updating EZproxy when SSO certificates are renewed

  • Generating metadata for SAML connection to EZproxy

  • SAML authentication in EZproxy

• If your library uses OpenAthens: open a request through EBSCO Connect at https://connect.ebsco.com/ or ask campus IT to update your connector in OpenAthens Admin at https://admin.openathens.net. OpenAthens documentation is available here: https://docs.openathens.net/libraries/what-to-do-when-a-certificate-changes

Timeline tip: Begin this process 2–3 weeks before the certificate expires to give IT and support providers enough time to complete the update without service disruption.

What you should do as library staff: Coordinate with your IT department to ensure OCLC (and, if applicable, EZproxy or OpenAthens support) receives the updated certificate information before the old one expires.

• Submit separate tickets: one for WMS/Discovery/ILL (OCLC Support), and a separate ticket for your authentication service (EZproxy via OCLC Support, or OpenAthens via EBSCO Connect). Opening separate tickets with OCLC Support is recommended so each ticket is routed correctly.

EBSCO and OCLC search interfaces are unlikely to return the same number of results. EBSCO’s EDS includes proprietary metadata and links to its own research content, while OCLC Discovery searches WorldCat Central Index and vendor-shared metadata available for Discovery search. On top of that, metadata sharing between platforms — especially with EBSCO’s restrictions — has to be adapted to each system’s unique architecture. Only a system identical to EDS, with the same search algorithms and base search indexes would return the same results.

Also, Discovery excludes “remote database” results from the main count. You have to link out of Discovery to see the EBSCO results, so they are included in the main count in EDS, along with other content not available in OCLC Discovery. Interestingly, if you click into a remote database from the Discovery remote database tray, the EBSCO counts there are fairly accurate for individual databases. It’s only when EDS runs a full-system search across all of its proprietary content and metadata that the numbers rise so sharply.

The key takeaway is that both systems surface a strong set of relevant, accessible results. OCLC Discovery is designed to give users a manageable set of results, while EDS emphasizes higher counts and more granular access to its own or partnered content. The difference is structural, not an indication that one system is more accurate. They're just different.

At the Collection level, WorldCat holdings for open-access collections are disabled by default in Collection Manager. To add selected open-access titles to Discovery, use institution setting (default) to add holdings.