I tried out the new WorldCat.org today, and decided to look for a book that
we had recently added to our collection to see if our automated holdings
update process was working.

I was concerned when WorldCat showed me, under "Find a Copy at a Library",
that the closest library that holds a copy was SUNY - 420 km away from the
library I'm sitting in. I could click "Borrow" to open up a view of the
item in SUNY's own library catalogue.

Then I noticed that the details default to a new "Featured libraries" list.
Beside that is a plain text "All libraries" label. It turns out that is a
clickable link (a bit odd, because all of the other clickable text on the
page is either blue or underlined).

When I clicked on it, my library was listed at the top of a long list of
libraries closer than SUNY, as you would expect. Yay, our holdings update
process is working.

However, you cannot interact with any of the libraries in the "All
libraries" list. They're just an institution name, possibly a library name,
and a geographic location. Nothing is clickable.

For years prior to the revamp, however, every library that held a copy was
listed in order of proximity to you, and you could click on any one of the
entries to be brought to that library's catalogue page for that item.
(Assuming you had updated your library info in OCLC's registry, of course.)

I couldn't understand why OCLC revamped their website and *removed*
functionality until I checked out their "For librarians" page (
https://www.worldcat.org/for-librarians) which "invite[s] you to learn more
about our web visibility program and how your library can participate."

The Web Visibility program (https://www.oclc.org/en/web-visibility.html)
says: "Your library’s collections can be represented in WorldCat, visible
on WorldCat.org, and shared by our visibility partners through a variety of
subscription choices." -- cha-ching!

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, the oldest version of that page (from April
2022 -
https://web.archive.org/web/20220413144759/https://www.oclc.org/en/web-visibility.html)
said: "When your library’s collections are represented in WorldCat through
any cataloging subscription and you maintain a FirstSearch/WorldCat
Discovery subscription, your library’s resources will be visible in
WorldCat.org search results."

In February, OCLC offered a "free streamlined holdings update process" to
libraries that hadn't kept their holdings up to date, with the promise
"Making these updates now will ensure the best presentation of your
library’s (libraries’) collections on the new WorldCat.org when it becomes
available." We, and presumably many other libraries, took advantage of the
offer. I suspect one of the reasons OCLC made that offer free was to ensure
their customers--ahem, members--were primed for adding a Web Visibility
subscription. (It also helps their WorldCat ILL product, of course.)

So the new WorldCat.org removed functionality in an apparent effort to
squeeze more money out of their members to restore that functionality. And
those who are unwilling or unable to pay up get shunted to a less visible
list that offers no user interaction.

Argh. I wish I could say I was surprised.

Geez, somebody should work on getting all library catalogues to emit a
standard representation of their holdings, say in schema.org format, so
that it would be easy for search engines, projects, etc to aggregate the
data and build services on top of that...