Month: January 2010

SFX Inter-Library Loan requests now through Library Catalogue

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Inter-Library Loan requests sent from the SFX (Find it @ NTU) service (see illustration below) are now submitted through the My Library Card section of the Library Catalogue.

When a customer clicks on this service in the SFX menu, they will be resolved to the Log in to My Library Card page of the Library Catalogue (unless they already have an active catalogue session running). Once their login has been accepted, the customer can select the My Library Card and then the Inter-Library Loans options to complete their request using the online form.

At present, SFX does not auto-populate the online form with the bibliographic data (as was the case previously with the ILLOS service). A refinement to SFX being released by Ex Libris in February is expected to reinstate this functionality.

Elsevier Science Direct – issue affecting SFX linking

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

A minor upgrade to the Elsevier Science Direct platform has inadvertently led to all outbound SFX links generating an error. (The issue is affecting all SFX customers of Science Direct, globally).

When a vistor clicks on an SFX (Find it @ NTU) link on a Science Direct result page (see illustration below) an error message appears in the new browser window: Not found: The requested object does not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it.

eServices is in contact with Elsevier technical support, and will advise once the problem has been resolved.

Temporary workaround

For any LLR colleagues urgently needing to send Elsevier citations to SFX in the meantime, please follow these technical steps. (This is only a temporary workaround pending a resolution of the problem by Elsevier):

* The error occurs because the Science Direct platform is currently generating a malformed OpenURL. To correct this and create a valid SFX URL copy-and-paste the URL from the pop-up SFX window into Notepad or other text editor. The URL will appear in this format:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/http%3A%2F%2Fsfx.ntu.ac.uk%2Fsfxlcl3?sid=Elsevier:SD&genre=article&issn=09537112&date=2004&volume=15&issue=3&spage=143

* Remove this section of the URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/http%3A%2F%2Fsfx.ntu.ac.uk%2F

* Replace this section of the URL with: http://sfx.ntu.ac.uk/

* This will create a correctly formatted OpenURL:

http://sfx.ntu.ac.uk/sfxlcl3?sid=Elsevier:SD&genre=article&issn=09537112&date=2004&volume=15&issue=3&spage=143

* Copy-and-paste this URL back into the address bar of the pop-up browser window and hit Return on the keyboard

* A full SFX menu of services should load

* If you encounter any problems using this workaround, please send a copy of the affected OpenURL to Lib eServices

eBrary – access problems resolved

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

eBrary’s technical team report that the issue affecting access to eBook content on the platform (25 January) has now been resolved, and all relevant content should now be accessible once again. Please contact eServices it you encounter any further problems with access.

eBrary – access problems affecting eBook content

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

eBrary’s technical team is working to resolve a problem which is causing access problems to eBook titles on the eBrary platform.

Some customers clicking on links to eBrary eBook titles in the Library Catalogue will see their browser resolve to the eBrary site with the following error message:

The URL entered or pasted is not one we recognize. If you copied and pasted the URL to get here, please double check the format. Make sure all the terms are there and that the URL contains no spaces or return characters.

Not all requests result in the error, and eBrary’s technicians currently believe that the Internet Explorer browser in more susceptible to the problem than Firefox – and recommend trying the Firefox browser in preference (though this will not guarantee successful access).

A further update will follow once eBrary’s technical team has confirmed that the problem has been resolved.

eBrary – changes to collection content from February 2010

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Libraries and Learning Resources’ subscription to the Academic Complete collection of eBooks on the eBrary platform concludes at the end of January.

Rather than subscribing to this package of 30K+ titles (not all of which were well used by staff and students) the Academic Liaison Team has identified a sub-set of several hundred key titles from within the collection which LLR wishes to offer continuing access to.

Access to these titles, from 1 Feburary 2010, have now been arranged with eBrary through a new Custom Collection put together for LLR. Titles in the eBrary Custom collection are grouped into three types:

* Multi-user access – perpetual: LLR has bought these titles outright, in perpetuity. There is no limit to the number of customers who may access these titles at any one time.

* Single-user access – perpetual: LLR has bought these titles outright, in perpetuity. Only one customer may access these titles at any one time.

* Multi-user access – rental: LLR has subscribed to these titles. There is no limit to the number of customers who may access these titles at any one time. Continuing access to these titles is dependent on LLR maintaining a subscription.

New records have been added to ALEPH for all of the eBrary Custom Collection titles. Before the end of the next week (when LLR’s subscription to the eBrary Academic Complete collection expires) all of the eBrary Academic Complete catalogue records will be removed from ALEPH. Until then, duplicate catalogue records will appear for those eBrary titles which are in both the Academic Complete and Custom collections.

When reviewing an individual eBrary catalogue record within the OPAC, LLR staff can identify the type of eBrary eBook they are looking at, as follows:

In the Full View of Record, click on the MARC tags option (see illustration below):

In the 900 field of the MARC record, a description of the eBrary collection to which the title belongs is provided:

All eBrary catalogue records containing the description ‘This eBook is part of the eBrary Academic Complete subscription‘ will be withdrawn (see illustration below):

All eBrary catalogue records containing one of the three descriptions below will be retained:

If you’ve any questions about the changes to eBrary content, please contact Acquisitions Manager Paul Tomlinson. If you’ve any technical questions about the transition to the new collection, please contact Lib eServices.

A further update will be provided next week when all of the eBrary Academic Complete collection records have been withdrawn from ALEPH.

New resource: OSH-UPDATE

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to the OSH-UPDATE service (which was previously provided through eSearch between November 2008 and November 2009) has been re-enabled in eSearch following the activation of a new subscription to the service. Access to the resource is direct on-campus; and by university username and password from off-campus.

OSH-UPDATE offers more than 500,000 records in the fields of occupational health, safety, hygiene, road safety, water safety and environment trends, drawn from a range of authoritative database sources including the UK legislation database; the UK Health and Safety Executive HSELINE; and the UK Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), and a number of other European and worldwide sources.

OSH-UPDATE provides full bibliographic citation and abstracts for all journal articles, conference reports and other materials in its index; and offers links to selected full-text services where these are available.

Additional information added to the Access Notes field in eSearch indicates that:

under the terms of LLR’s subscription to OSH-UPDATE only one person may access the resource at a time. To free up the service for the next visitor, always remember to Logoff at the end of your session. If you see the following error message, “You have reached your licences limit on the number of concurrent sessions”, please try again later.

Deep-linking to EBSCOhost full-text from off-campus – making it easier to login

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Off-campus links to all EBSCOhost databases in eSearch resolve directly to the NTU Single Sign-on page. However, linking to individual journal and article content within EBSCOhost from SFX has until now involved several extra steps to reach the Single Sign-on page – the first of which involved clicking on the Shibboleth link in the main interface screen.

Several service calls have indicated that these extra steps (and the terminology they involve) caused understandable customer confusion. Some additional technical configuration has therefore been activated for all full-text EBSCOhost databases (namely Academic Search Elite, Business Source Premier, Psycarticles and Regional Business News) which will instead resolve the off-campus SFX customer to a UK Access Management Federation WAYF (Where Are You From?) page, from which they can select ‘Nottingham Trent University’ and be resolved directly to the NTU Single-Sign-on page (all without any reference to ‘Shibboleth’).

It is hoped that this will make the login process more straightforward and intuitive. Feedback on this refinement is welcomed. Please note that any customer who Googles their way to EBSCOhost will still need to work through the steps outlined in the EBSCOhost Shibboleth walkthrough on the eServices Support wiki.