Month: December 2008

New extended trial resource: Research Starters – Education

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Trial access to the EBSCOhost database ‘Research Starters – Education’ has been enabled in eSearch. Access to the service will be available until September 2009. As with other EBSCO databases, access is direct on-campus and by Athens username and password off-campus. The resource is described as follows:

Study and research guides designed specifically for advanced high school students, college students and selected graduate students. They consist of comprehensive, yet concise topic summary articles of about 3,000 words in length written by researchers, scholars and other subject matter experts.

Shibboleth Single Sign-on – improved logon

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

As colleagues will be aware, access to online resources that are Shibboleth enabled is by university username and password. An enhancement to the login service that has now gone live means that if a customer inadvertently adds an ADS\ prefix to their username, the system will automatically strip this out and allow the customer’s login to proceed normally without generating an error (e.g. ADS\N0101010 will be converted to N0101010). The same process works if the customer incorrectly enters the unwanted ADS with a forward slash as well (e.g. ADS/N0101010 will be converted to N0101010).

This enhancement should reduce the instance of rejected logins, whilst operating as a discrete behind-the-scenes process. The instruction to customers remains unchanged: “Login using your university username and password”.

Withdrawn resources: Interior Design Handbook, OSH-ROM, JustCite

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The listing for the Interior design handbook has been withdrawn from eSearch.

The entry for the OSH-ROM service has also been withdrawn (this resource has been superseded by the new OSH-UPDATE service, available in eSearch).

The entry for the JustCite service has been withdrawn from eSearch.

Web of Knowledge – service problems

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The Web of Knowledge service is experiencing technical problems which may lead to some users finding slowness or problems with access. Engineers are working to fix this, but customers may experience difficulties with the following services:

Arts & Humanities Citation Index
ISI Proceedings
Journal Citation Reports
Science Citation Index
Social Sciences Citation Index
Web of Knowledge
Web of Science

A further update will be provided when it has been confirmed that the service is operating normally once again.

Nexis UK – Athens authentication problems

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

A temporary problem affecting one of the authentication servers for the Nexis UK service is preventing some customers from accessing the service using an Athens username and password.

When the problem occurs, the customer login credentials are rejected and the following error message displays in the Athens login screen.

There was a problem processing your request. If the problem persists, please contact your local Athens administrator.

This problem occurs for customers who are either (a) logging in to the service for the first time ever; or, (b) logging in to the service for the first time from a different computer, or (c) logging into the service for the first time using a different browser (such as Firefox, rather than IE).

Library colleagues and university staff members who have previously accessed the service from their regular workstations (using their prefered browser) should not experience the same problems.

Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this problem for affected customers; but Nexis expect that technical work scheduled for this evening should correct the problem.

A further update will be provided once Nexis have confirmed that the service is again working normally.