Author: Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

New resource: Alexander Street Press (audio-visual collection)

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Alexander Street Press - audio-visual collection

Access to the Alexander Street Press (audio-visual collection) has been enabled in Library OneSearch. Access to the collection is direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. (Please note that only those links provided through Library OneSearch will authenticate successfully for customers accessing the collection or titles within it from off-campus.) The collection is described as follows:

The Alexander Street Press audio-visual collection provides access to more than 30,000 videos ranging across the disciplines of literature, music, women’s history, black history, psychological counselling and therapy, social and cultural history, drama, medicine, theatre, film and the performing arts, religion, sociology and many other areas. Navigable, interactive transcripts are provided, along with clips and highlighted segments. Register as an individual user of the service to bookmark items, create clips and embed videos.

As well as a collection level entry in the Find Databases service, individual catalogue records for titles in the collection have also been added to the Library OneSearch ‘Books and Audio-Visual’ index. Example titles include:

New resource: British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries (1500-1950)

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries (1500-1950)

Access to the British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries (1500-1950) collection (from Alexander Street Press) has been enabled in Library OneSearch. Access to the collection is direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. (Please note that only those links provided through Library OneSearch will authenticate successfully for customers accessing the collection or titles within it from off-campus.) The collection is described as follows:

Spanning more than 300 years, British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries bring researchers the personal experiences of nearly 500 women as revealed in over 90,000 pages of diaries and letters. Of interest to historians, sociologists, students of literature, researchers in genealogy and those working in many other disciplines, the collection combines primary material from the personal papers of the diarists and letter writers (drawn from across the period from 1500 to 1950) with biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources. Represented are all age groups and life stages, all ethnicities, many geographical regions, the famous and the not so famous.

As well as a collection level entry in the Find Databases look-up, individual catalogue records for titles in the collection have also been added to the Library OneSearch ‘Books and Audio-Visual’ index. Example titles include:

New resource: Underground & Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Black Cat Crossing comic

Access to the Underground & Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels collection (from Alexander Street Press) has been enabled in Library OneSearch. Access to the collection is direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. (Please note that only those links provided through Library OneSearch will authenticate successfully for customers accessing the collection or titles within it from off-campus.) The collection is described as follows:

The Underground and Independent Comics, Comix And Graphic Novels collection provides access to a wide variety of alternative comics from the 1960s to today (with a particular focus on those from North America). When completed, the collection will include more than 100,000 pages of materials, including 75,000 pages of primary materials (the comics themselves), and more than 25,000 pages of materials about comics, including interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism – from The Comics Journal and other secondary sources. The collection contains scans of both original comics and reprint books. There are a limited number of pre-1960s materials included due to their influence on later works and their overall historical significance. Since many underground comics were anthologies, only those stories for which the providers have received permission from the copyright holders are included.

As well as a collection level entry in the Find Databases look-up, individual catalogue records for titles in the collection have also been added to the Library OneSearch ‘Books and Audio-Visual’ index. Example titles include:

New resource: American Film Scripts online

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

American Film Scripts Online

Access to American Film Scripts online (from Alexander Street Press) has been enabled in Library OneSearch. Access to the collection is direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus. (Please note that only those links provided through Library OneSearch will authenticate successfully for customers accessing the collection or titles within it from off-campus.) The collection is described as follows:

American Film Scripts Online contains more than 1000 film scripts from the US film industry, together with detailed, information on the scenes, characters and people associated the scripts. The database includes facsimile images for more than 500 of these screenplays. Individual scripts can be studied in detail, or particular script components (such as character type, dramatic theme or setting) can be compared across different scripts in the collection. The primary focus of the database is the written work, rather than the film itself, enabling the scrutiny of the structure of films, character development, beginnings and endings, plot points and scenes.

As well as a collection level entry in the Find Databases service, individual catalogue records for titles in the collection have also been added to the Library OneSearch ‘Books and Audio-Visual’ index. Example titles include:

JSTOR – Shibboleth maintenance – 20-25 August

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The technical team at JSTOR advise that beginning today (20 August) they are carrying out some maintenance work on their Shibboleth infrastructure – work that may cause authentication delays for new off-campus visitors to the platform. They report:

Shibboleth users that are logging into JSTOR for the first time (e.g. new accounts) may experience between a 5-30 minute delay in being authenticated. We recommend that if users have this experience, they come back to JSTOR and login again after 30 minutes has past. At that point, they should gain access immediately.
Please note that this only impacts new users. Users that have already logged into JSTOR prior to today should not experience any delay.

It is expected that the work will be completed early next week (by 25 August). Direct on-campus access will not be affected by this work.

Bloomsbury – off-campus authentication issues resolved

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The previously reported problems preventing off-campus access to eBook titles on the Bloomsbury Collections platform have now been resolved.

Off-campus access is available once again by university username and password. An illustrated walkthrough of each step in the off-campus login process is available.

Bloomsbury Collections eBook titles: off-campus access currently unavailable

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Off-campus access to eBook titles in the Bloomsbury Collections set is currently unavailable due to a problem affecting Bloomsbury’s Shibboleth Service Provider.

Off-campus login requests (via NTU username and password) are currently resolving to an error page. A further update will follow once off-campus access to Bloomsbury Collections’ content has been reinstated. On-campus access (via IP authentication) is unaffected.

Bloomsbury Collections - Shibboleth option

Dawsonera eBooks: access restored

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to eBooks on the Dawsonera platform has been restored, following the resolution of the issues affecting the Dawsonera Shibboleth service provider.

New resource: Dawn of the Unread eBook series

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Dawn of the Unread - titles

The sixteen free-to-access eBook titles in the Dawn of the Unread series (part of the award-winning Nottingham-based Dawn of the Unread project) can now be accessed through Library OneSearch. The Dawn of the Unread series imagines:

what would happen if the great literary figures from Nottingham’s past went unread. If their ideas are not preserved and made accessible will they effectively disappear from our minds? Sillitoe, Lawrence, Byron et al would never put up with such an insult and so return from the grave, in a twist on the zombie genre, in search of the one thing that will ensure their survival: ‘boooks’.

Catalogue records for each of the sixteen entries in the series (including links to the PDF versions of each instalment) are now available in Library OneSearch:

The Dawn of the Unread series is also available through a mobile app on the Windows, Android and iOs platforms.

Dawn of the Unread

Dawsonera eBook platform: access currently unavailable

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to eBook titles on the Dawsonera is currently unavailable to library customers due to technical problems affecting the Dawsonera Shibboleth service provider. A further update will follow once access has been restored.

Withdrawn resource: ICONDA

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access to ICONDA (a bibliographic database covering building, construction and architecture, delivered through the OVID-SP platform) has been withdrawn from the Find Databases service in Library OneSearch following the conclusion of the library’s subscription to the resource.

UK Press Online – platform update

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The UK Press Online service have just launched an updated version of their discovery platform. (LLR has been involved in some pre-release technical testing of the new interface.) Access to the service remains direct on-campus and by university username and password from off-campus.

Library customers accessing UK Press Online from off-campus through Library OneSearch will be automatically directed to the university’s single sign-on page. Anyone navigating to the platform independently from off-campus, will need to select the UK Federation Access option from the UK Press Online login page (see illustration below), and then search for ‘Nottingham Trent University’ on the Where Are You From (WAYF) page.

UK Press Online - new Shibboleth login screen