News

WorldCat Local To Retire - Transfer Personal Lists To WorldCat Discovery Before August 9

Published: 24 May 2019

McGill Library recently upgraded the existing WorldCat Local online catalogue and search tool to its successor WorldCat Discovery. Now that WorldCat Discovery delivers functionality beyond that in WorldCat Local, provider OCLC plans to retire WorldCat Local on 9 August 2019. Library users who have created and saved personal lists on their WorldCat Local user account should export lists into their WorldCat Discovery user account before August 9th.

To retain your lists, please follow the following instructions: 

Each list must be downloaded from WorldCat Local and then uploaded to create a new list on WorldCat Discovery. The information that users may have added to the notes field does not transfer in this process. Once signed-in to WorldCat Discovery, the steps for migrating personal lists can be found under “Import My List”.

To download your personal list from WorldCat Local:

  1. Login to WorldCat Local to view your lists.
  2. Select the list that you want to download.
  3. At the top of the list, click the Export to CSV link.
  4. Save the file where you can find it later.

To import your personal list to WorldCat Discovery:

  1. Sign-in to WorldCat Discovery.
  2. Click your account name to display a drop-down list and select Import My Lists.
  3. Provide a List Name (required) and List Description (optional).
  4. Click Choose File to locate the file to be imported.
  5. Click Import List to begin the import process.

Lists in WorldCat Discovery are limited to 100 items per list. When imported, the list will be broken down into multiple lists with 100 or fewer items each. All the lists will have progressive numeric list names. For example, if there are 375 items on a list and you import it with list name “Literature”. After importing there will be 4 lists with the names – Literature 1, Literature 2, Literature 3 and Literature 4. To view your lists in WorldCat Discovery, click on your library drop-down menu in the upper right corner and select My Personal Lists.


Thanks for your patience during this transitional period.

For assistance with any of these procedures, do not hesitate to contact your liaison librarian.

For more information on McGill’s move towards a single catalogue via WorldCat Discovery, click here.

Questions? Contact us at discovery.library [at] mcgill.ca.

Back to top