Month: December 2009

Newton – ‘on campus’ access issues

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

LLR is working with IS to resolve issues affecting on-campus access to electronic resources from the first staff offices to be occupied in the newly re-opened Newton building. Because of the way that Newton PCs have been registered on the NTU network, external web connections from these PCs are not recognised as coming from Nottingham Trent University locations. This is because the IPs of these PCs are outside the normal IP-range of the university. This means that academic staff accessing electronic library subscription services which use IP authentication are not automatically logged in, and are effectively treated as being ‘off-campus’.

While LLR works to secure a resolution to this problem, the advice to NTU staff attempting to access electronic resources from locations within Newton is 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 possible) on which staff can login in exactly the same ways as if they were off-site.

Further updates will follow as a resolution to this issue is progressed.

RefWorks – NTU ‘Output Style’ changes now live

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

An additional bibliographic ‘Output Style’ is now available in RefWorks to all Nottingham Trent University staff and students – named Harvard LLR – all authors (December 2009). The only difference between this additional output style and the previous Harvard LLR style is the treatment of multiple authors. The Harvard LLR – all authors output style, as the name suggests, lists all of the authors of a piece of work rather than using the ‘et al.’ convention to indicate the existence of four or more authors, as the Harvard LLR style does.

As some minor punctuation changes have also been made to the existing Harvard LLR style, it has been renamed Harvard LLR (December 2009). Both output styles appear under the ‘Nottingham Trent University Specific’ heading in the Output Style drop-down list (see illustration below).

Below are some (fictitious) references illustrating some of the presentational differences between the two styles:

A Journal article:

Harvard LLR – all authors (December 2009):

CLEMENS, S.L., FAULKNER, W.C., BROWNING, E.B., MURRAY, J.S., ALCOTT, L.M., STOWE, H.B. and SANDBURG, C.A., 2010. The History of Everything. Journal of Total History, 24 (12), 22-44.

Harvard LLR (December 2009):

CLEMENS, S.L., et al., 2010. The History of Everything. Journal of Total History, 24 (12), 22-44.

A Chapter in an edited book:

Harvard LLR – all authors (December 2009):

CLEMENS, S.L., FAULKNER, W.C., BROWNING, E.B., MURRAY, J.S., ALCOTT, L.M., STOWE, H.B. and SANDBURG, C.A., 2012. The History of Everything. In: R.W. EMERSON, W.B. YEATS and R.L. FROST, eds., The Complete Book of Total History. 2nd ed. Nottingham: Premier, 2012, pp. 44-66.

Harvard LLR (December 2009):

CLEMENS, S.L., et al. 2012. The History of Everything. In: R.W. EMERSON, W.B. YEATS and R.L. FROST, eds., The Complete Book of Total History. 2nd ed. Nottingham: Premier, 2012, pp. 44-66.

Continuing problems with on-campus access to external web resources

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Technical issues affecting on-campus access to external web resources, previously reported on 3 December, are continuing to cause significant intermittent problems. As IS’s attempts to isolate the cause of the technical difficulties continue, the advice from eServices remains unchanged:

“If you encounter problems with accessing external web sites, please report details of the issue to the eServices team for us to investigate. We may be able to suggest an alternative means of access to the resource, and will also need to confirm that the problem you are reporting is not caused by an unrelated service issue.”

eBrary eBook collection unavailable

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The eBrary eBook web site is currently unavailable. Requests to all eBrary titles through the Library Catalogue, or to the eBrary platform itself through eSearch, are returning the following error:

Our site is unavailable at the moment
We are installing improvements to our service.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
Please check back later.

This is not a scheduled downtime, but a loss of service which eBrary anticipate that they will be able to correct shortly.

A further update will follow once eBrary have confirmed that access to the service has been restored.

ALEPH now available once again

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

All ALEPH services are now available once again, following the full recovery of the service.

Please attempt to connect as normal (to the ALEPH client, Self-Service and the Library Catalogue as required) and confirm that all services are working normally.

If you encounter any problems with connecting to ALEPH, please contact eServices with the details.

ALEPH: temporarily unavailable this morning

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

A restart of all ALEPH services first thing this morning, requested by IS yesterday, is taking far longer to complete that was anticipated. The restart should have taken between 10-15mins and began at just after 7am this morning, but new process on version 20 of ALEPH are taking long to run through than has been seen previously.

Currently all connections to ALEPH (including all client connections, self-service and the OPAC) are unavailable.

We are working very closely with IS to resolve this issue as soon as possible, and will update as soon as access to ALEPH has been restored.

Problems affecting on-campus access to external web resources

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

LLR staff and customers working on-campus may continue to experience intermittent problems accessing external databases and online services, pending the resolution of a technical issue affecting the NTU network which our colleagues in Information Systems are urgently investigating.

The problem results in the slow return of some web page requests, and often a time-out “Page cannot be displayed” error. In some instances, refreshing the page in the browser may result in the page loading correctly; but in other cases the site may remain inaccessible.

If you encounter problems with accessing external web sites, please report details of the issue to the eServices team for us to investigate. We may be able to suggest an alternative means of access to the resource, and will also need to confirm that the problem you are reporting is not caused by an unrelated service issue.

A further update will follow once IS has been able to identify and resolve the cause of these difficulties.

If you’ve any questions about this, please contact eServices for more information.

EBSCOhost databases – Shibboleth authentication working once again

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

EBSCOhost have confirmed that the issue affecting their Shibboleth service has now been resolved. Off-campus access to all EBSCOhost databases is once again available by univeristy username and password.

The temporary off-campus access account details provided by EBSCOhost in the interim will shortly be disabled.

All of the service issue icons and customer notifications on EBSCOhost databases have been removed from eSearch.

If you continue to receive reports of any off-campus access difficulties affecting EBSCOhost databases, please report the details to eServices.

Problem affecting off-campus access to EBSCOhost databases

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Off-campus access to databases on the EBSCOhost platform is currently unavailable, due to problems affecting EBSCO’s Shibboleth authentication service. (On-campus access is unaffected).

When attempting to login to an EBSCOhost database from off-campus, the following error message displays:

Session Creation Failure

The inter-institutional access system was unable to successfully build a login session for you at [date and time]

To report this problem, please contact the site administrator at root@localhost. (Please note, there is no need to act on this instruction)

Please include the following message in any email:

Session creation failure at (https://shibboleth.ebscohost.com/Shibboleth.sso/SAML/POST)

Session Creation Error

The databases involved are:

  • Academic Search Elite
  • Business Source Premier
  • EconLit
  • International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
  • Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts
  • PsycARTICLES
  • PsycINFO
  • Regional Business News
  • SPORTDiscus
  • Textile Technology Index

This problem is affecting all UK universities using the Shibboleth framework for EBSCOhost authentication. A further update will be provided once we have received confirmation of a resolution from EBSCOhost.