Month: December 2009

New resource: LACORS

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to the LACORS service has been enabled in eSearch; access is direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. The resource is described as follows:

LACORS provides information about local authority regulatory and selected services in the UK. Topics covered include food safety and hygiene, health and safety, environmental protectionm and animal health and welfare.

LLR’s subscription permits one staff member or student to access to the resource at any one time – a note to this effect has been added to the eSearch information screen.

Withdrawn resource: Taylor and Francis eBooks

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

LLR’s subscription to 150+ titles on the Taylor and Francis eBook platform concludes at the end of December. The entry for T&F eBooks in eSearch will be withdrawn and all the individual eBook records will be removed from the Library Catalogue and SFX.

Network access to external web resources: IS report problem resolved

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

IS has confirmed that the network problems affecting on-campus access to external web resources (reported on 3 December and 10 December) have been resolved, following the implementation of several network management changes. Please report to Lib eServices details of any instances where remote access problems continue or reoccur.

Newton: solution agreed to secure on-campus

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

eServices have been able to agree with IS new configuration arrangements which will re-enable IP authentication from PCs in the newly re-opened Newton building. The solution requires LLR to register additional IP information with all providers offering IP-based authentication. While this work is being urgently undertaken, it is likely that the re-registration process will not be fully completed until the new year. The advice to NTU staff and students attempting to access electronic resources from locations within Newton continue to be to use the eSearch, SFX and Library Catalogue access routes to these resources (rather than using any previously stored bookmarks). This will ensure that such requests are automatically routed to the appropriate off-campus login screens (wherever necessary) on which staff can login in exactly the same ways as if they were off-site.

MyiLibrary – temporary access problems resolved

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Problems affecting the MyiLibrary Shibboleth authentication service, which began over the weekend (19-20 December), were resolved on Monday 21 December. During the interruption in service, customers logging in to MyiLibrary eBook titles using their university username and password saw the following error message:

“Unauthorized Identity Provider

The identity provider supplying your login credentials is not authorized for use with this service.”

Intute – JISC withdraws funding from 1 August 2010

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

JISC has announced that it will cease funding of the Intute service from 1 August 2010. Intute is investigating alternate forms of funding, and exploring options for the future of the service, but in the absence of any such arrangement being put in place, the following resources will be withdrawn from eSearch at the end of July 2010.

  • Intute
  • Intute: Arts and Humanities
  • Intute: Health & Life Sciences
  • Intute: Science, Engineering & Technology
  • Intute: Social Sciences
  • Intute: Social Sciences, Statistics and Data

Informaworld – Shibboleth authentication

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Shibboleth authentication has been enabled for all ejournals on the Informaworld platform. At present the off-campus access to Informaworld titles supported by LLR is through a Shibbolized eZproxy connection, but in the new year authentication will be migrated to a fully Shibboleth compliant login. This changeover will mean that customers can login to Informaworld in the platform’s native interface rather than only through the special eZproxy links provided in eSearch and SFX. For the time being, customers in the native interface of Informaworld can click on the ‘Shibboleth’ login link (see illustration below) and select Nottingham Trent University from the WAYF (Where Are You From?) page.

Network deployment of new Write-N-Cite plug-in for Word – January 2010

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The eServices team has worked with colleagues in the Software Deployment team in IS to schedule the deployment of Version 3 of the RefWorks Write-N-Cite plug for Word in January 2010. Deployment will begin in w/b 4 January, and a further update will follow once IS has confirmed that the deployment has been completed on all staff and student PCs.

The key enhancement that v3 of Write-N-Cite delivers is the ability to work with (and incrementally update) a single Word document containing in-text citations and associated bibliography (rather than having to generate separate FINAL versions of each annotated document). As it is possible to continue to amend a document for which formatted citations have been generated, staff and students can view the ‘actual’ references in their work-in-progress documents (rather than the coded RefWorks placeholders).

Because of the underlying changes in the software which makes this enhancement possible, any documents previously created using v2 of Write-N-Cite will need to be converted to become compatible with v3. The simple conversion process is documented on the eServices Support wiki. A step-by-step walkthough document is downloadable from the wiki page in both Word and .pdf formats.

RefWorks 2.0 User Interface – Summer 2010

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

In the new year, RefWorks will release its updated v.2.0 User Interface. Review the Press Release; read the introduction to the new version; see screen grabs of some of the key new areas of functionality; and consult the FAQs.

Although the new interface will be available to RefWorks customers in early 2010, Libraries and Learning Resources will not migrate accounts from the existing interface until next summer (rather than introduce this part-way through the academic year). Once the new interface is released, individual staff members and students will have the option to select it as a personal preference, but until all NTU accounts are migrated wholesale to the new version the existing interface will remain the default.

eBrary eBook platform – access problems resolved

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The access problems affecting the eBrary eBook platform (reported on Tuesday 8 December) have now been fully resolved. eBrary’s technicians were able to resolve most of the access issues later the same day, though some secondary problems persisted. This morning, eBrary were able to confirm that all remaining access issues had been dealt with and the service was fully operational once again.