Month: May 2013

RefWorks: cause of Shibboleth error reported by some customers

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The RefWorks technical team are aware of a known bug affecting their Shibboleth Service Provider (SP) which can cause authentication failures in one particular scenario.

The issue can arise when a student or staff member accesses RefWorks through a search engine look-up or by typing the domain name directly into their browser address bar, rather than through using library managed links to RefWorks.

This is because the RefWorks Shibboleth service treats differently requests which originate from http://www.refworks.com from those which originate from http://refworks.com

Login requests which begin from http://www.refworks.com will complete successfully, while requests which start from http://refworks.com will not, and will generate authentication failures and error messages.

To avoid the risk of these problems, the recommendation is to use the direct links to RefWorks on the library website, or to ensure that requests to RefWorks include the ‘www’ element in the web address.

The WAYFLess deep-link, which directs the user straight to the NTU Single Sign-on page, and then returns them (once successfully logged-in) to RefWorks is:

https://www.refworks.com/RWShibboleth?providerid=https://shib2idp.ntu.ac.uk/idp/shibboleth

Nomad Statistics service renamed as Nottingham Insight

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The free-to-access Nomad Statistics database has been renamed as Nottingham Insight, in Library OneSearch, to reflect the upgrade and rebranding of the service. The access URL has also been updated. Access to service remains unrestricted on-campus and off-campus. The description of the service has been amended, and how reads as follows:

Nottingham City Council’s interactive statistical website with thematic maps presenting anti-social data, census of population data, crime data, fire & rescue data, and indices of deprivation. It also has access to customer data from Experian’s Mosaic database product.

Resolved: problem affecting secure proxy service

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

A problem affecting the eZproxy service this afternoon (which manages secure off-campus access to resources which only support IP-based authentication) has now been resolved.

After login, off-campus library customers attempting to login to resources managed by secure proxy authentication were being resolved to an error page displaying a “Session Creation Error”.

This issue has now been fixed, and proxy requests through the eZproxy service are again resolving normally.

Chadwyck Healey – Shibboleth configuration changes

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Following changes to Shibboleth configuration on the Chadwyck Healey database platform, off-campus deep-link login URLs for the following services have been updated in Library OneSearch:

  • ABELL
  • EEBO
  • House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) – 18th Century
  • House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) – 19th Century
  • House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP) – 20th Century
  • John Johnson Collection
  • LION
  • MLA