RefWorks service issue – 26 March 2015

Customer Services were alerted to issues affecting RefWorks services yesterday evening (26 March) shortly after 19:00. These included slow response times, page time-outs and browser errors.

On- campus use of RefWorks was particularly high at the time, due to assignment submission deadlines.

The RefWorks technical team in the US were able to identify and rectify the problem, and confirmed full recovery of services before 20:40.

Sage Knowledge eBook collection

As part of the continuing growth of the ‘Your Books, More Books’ service, just over 4,300 new eBook titles from Sage Knowledge are now discoverable in Library OneSearch. Example titles include:

Access to all subscribed titles in the collection is direct on-campus, and by university username and password from off-campus. At present, support for the Shibboleth protocol on the Sage Knowledge platform is limited, so we are unable to incorporate authentication-aware direct title-level deep-links in the Library OneSearch records for customers accessing Sage Knowledge titles from off-campus.

As a consequence, the current off-campus experience when logging in to the first Sage Knowlege book in a collection involves several steps (which are documented below). The library is continuing to impress on Sage the need to improve this far from seamless off-campus experience, and further updates will be provided as and when this element of the service offer improves. The current walkthrough for off-campus access is as follows:

Sage Knowledge - eBook - select 'Login'

Follow the Online link from Library OneSearch, and on the Summary page for the requested title select the login option (see above).

Sage Knowledge - eBook - select 'Login via institution'

On the login pop-up which displays, select Login via your institution (see above).

Sage Knowledge - eBook - 'Select institution'

From the Please select your institution list locate ‘Nottingham Trent University’ and click on the Go to Login button (see above). On the NTU Single Sign-on page, enter your university username and password and log in.

Sage Knowledge - eBook - NTU login confirmed

Your browser will be returned to the homepage of the Sage Knowledge platform (and not to the individual eBook record). In the top-right hand corner of the screen, the display of ‘Nottingham Trent University’ will confirm that the login request has been processed successfully.

Sage Knowledge - eBook - NTU login confirmed

Return the brower to the tab or page containing the display of results from Library OneSearch and click on the View Online link for a second time. This will return the display in your browser of the Sage Knowledge platfom to the authenticated full-text of the requested eBook, with the display of the Nottingham Trent University logo in the top right-hand of the screen confirming that a current logged-in session is active.

Subsequent requests from Library OneSearch to Sage Knowledge titles (in the same off-campus session) will resolve to the authenticated full-text at the title level.

Science Direct – intermittent SFX linking issues resolved

A problem which was causing intermittent errors on requests from SFX to article content on the Elsevier Science Direct platform has now been resolved.

In some cases, requests were being resolved from SFX to an error page, even though the full-text was discoverable by direct searches on the Science Direct platform.

Requests from Library OneSearch, through SFX, to Science Direct full-text content should all now be resolving normally.