Month: March 2016

WGSN – new platform launched; off-campus registration issues

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The WGSN service has launched a new and upgraded platform. Access links in Library OneSearch have been updated accordingly. Access to the service for staff and students remains direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. Additional individual account registration is still required in order to make use of WGSN services.

The Creating a user account for WGSN guide available through Library OneSearch has been updated to take account of the WGSN site changes.

Currently, due to the site upgrade, it is not possible to register for a new WGSN account from an off-campus location. A note alerting staff and students to this access constraint has been added to the WGSN record in LOS.

Previously registered users can continue to access the site from off-campus; and once an account has been registered from an on-site location, off-campus access is available. The library is in discussion with the WGSN technical team to see if off-site registration for WGSN can be restored.

WGSN - March - 2016

UPDATE, SEPTEMBER 2016: Off-campus registration for the WGSN service is possible once again. An updated how-to-register guide has been made available through Library OneSearch

ProQuest maintenance alert – 12-13 March 2016

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

ProQuest have just announced a maintenance period for this weekend, to enable the “critical firmware updates” to be installed across its systems infrastructure.

The maintenance period will begin at 22:00 on Saturday 12 March 2016 and end at 03:00 on Sunday 13 March. During this period, the following services will be unavailable:

  • All databases on the search.proquest.com platform
  • RefWorks
  • Syndetics (‘Learn more about this book’ service in LOS)

Users attempting to access these products during the downtime will be re-directed to a web page explaining the scheduled maintenance period.

New resource: EDITED

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to the EDITED platform has been enabled in the Find Databases service of Library OneSearch. Access is by university username and password from on-campus, and is only available through the library mediated links provided in Library OneSearch. Off-campus access is not permitted under the terms of EDITED’s educational licence. The resource is described as follows:

EDITED is a retail analytics software for apparel brands and retailers, containing real-time data and analysis. It allows industry professionals to track consumer trends in real time by monitoring over ten million products showing sales, price changes, and discounting. This information can then be used to adjust their merchandising and marketing to reflect current market conditions.

EDITED

Members of NTU attempting to access EDITED from outside of the university’s IP range will see the following message after logging in:

EDITED.com IP restriction error message

New resource: Portico – triggered ejournal titles now available

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Libraries and Learning Resources is a member of the Portico eBook and ejournal preservation service. Publishers who are members of the service, register their content with Portico and, in the event that the publisher is no longer able to provide electronic access to any part of that content in the future, Portico steps in to provide in-perpetuity electronic access. Electronic access to ‘triggered’ titles is available to all member institutions, irrespective of any previous subscription arrangement with the publisher concerned.

Trigger events include the following:

  • Cessation of a publisher’s operations
  • Discontinuation of a title by a publisher
  • Back issues no longer offered by a publisher
  • Catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform

Access to the first twenty such ‘triggered’ ejournal titles has now been enabled in SFX. Access is direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. Off-campus access is only available through library mediated links. A list of the titles now accessible on the Portico platform can be reviewed in the SFX ejournal A-Z.

Portico

EBSCOhost – linking issues affecting SFX

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

EBSCO have just launched some unannounced changes to the way that EBSCOhost processes link requests from SFX (and other OpenURL resolvers) which are resulting in error messages and failed connections for some full-text requests on the EBSCOhost platform.

Ex Libris are in active discussions with EBSCO and, once the changes have been documented and understood, Ex Libris will design, package and release fixes for the EBSCOhost linking logic for SFX. The library will then need to deploy the updated parsers to SFX to resolve the problem.

A further update will follow once as this process is completed, but, until the fixes are in place, a larger proportion of EBSCOhost link requests from SFX than normal will result in errors. For the majority of full-text content on the EBSCOhost platform it is possible to copy and share an authentication-aware ‘permalink’ which will provide a persistent deep-link to full-text outcomes.

Sage Knowledge eBook Collection: accessible again

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Following the interruption in access on the Sage Knowledge eBook Collection reported yesterday, Sage has restored the access to the 4,300 eBook titles in the library’s collection. Access to all subscribed titles in the collection is once again direct on-campus, and by university username and password from off-campus.

The Sage Knowledge platform has improved the handling of deep-linking through institutional login since the library first provided a walkthrough of each step of the process in March 2015. The revised off-campus login process is now as follows:

In the top-right hand corner of the screen, click on the Institution button (see illustration below):

Sage Knowledge eBook platform - off-campus login - March 2016 - step one

In the pop-up that then loads, do not enter your username or password in the ‘Institutional Login’ boxes, but instead click on the Shibboleth link in the ‘Other Login Options’ section (see illustration below):

Sage Knowledge eBook platform - off-campus login - March 2016 - step two

On the ‘Shibboleth Login’ page that then loads, select Nottingham Trent University from the drop-down list, to direct the browser to the ‘NTU Single Sign-on’ page (see illustration below).

Sage Knowledge eBook platform - off-campus login - March 2016 - step three

After logging in successfully, your browser will be returned to the Sage Knowledge eBook platform; and to the same page on which your login request began: in other words, deep-linking to the eBook title level (which was not previously supported for off-campus visitors) now works first time.

Sage Knowledge eBook Collection: access currently unavailable

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to all 4,300 eBook titles in the library’s Sage Knowledge eBook Collection is currently unavailable due to administrative problems affecting the Sage Knowledge platform.

At present, links from Sage Knowledge eBook titles in Library OneSearch resolve to the Sage Knowledge home page; while searches on the Sage Knowledge platform return results lists in which none of the titles are accessible in full-text.

The library is working with Sage to restore access to these titles as soon as possible, and a further update will follow once access has been restored.