Author: Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

New resource: JISC Journals Archive

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Alongside the JISC MediaHub, the JISC e-Collections service also provides access to the JISC Journals Archive (and JISC Historic Books – see separate post). Access to the JISC Journals Archive is by university username and password from on-campus and off-campus. The resource is described as follows:

JISC Journal Archives, part of the JISC eCollections service, consolidates a number of separate journal archives to provide a single platform for simple and fast cross-searching and full-text access across more than 600 journal titles, from: Brill, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institute of Physics, ProQuest, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

At present, individual journal title records from the JISC Journals Archives are not available through SFX, but it is intended to add these to Library OneSearch and the ejournal A-Z list as soon as the record set is made available to subscribing institutions.

New resource: JISC Historic Books

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Alongside the JISC MediaHub, the JISC e-Collections service also provides access to the JISC Historic Books collection (and the JISC Journal Archive – see separate post). Access to JISC Historic eBooks is by university username and password from on-campus and off-campus. The resource is described as follows:

The JISC Historic Book collection provides access, through a single search interface, to the libraries of the British Library 19th Century eBook collection, ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and EEBO (Early English Books Online). Each collection can be searched separately or in combination.

ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) features 150,000 printed volumes — English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, with full-text search capabilities across all 26 million pages.

EEBO (Early English Books Online) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. EEBO gives users access to a huge range of primary resources, including many important literary and historical texts.

The British Library 19th Century eBook collection provides access to more than 25 million pages across discplines including philosophy, history, poetry and literature, with the original typeface, illustrations and fold-out pages for each book. Many rare or inaccessible books published between 1789 and 1914 are now digital, discoverable and searchable for the first time.

At present, individual eBook records from the JISC Historic Books collection are not made available by JISC but may be provided in future.

New resource: Box of Broadcasts (BoB)

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The BoB (Box of Broadcasts) off-air recording and broadcast media archive service is now available through Library OneSearch. Access to BoB is by university username and password on-campus and off-campus (and, for licensing reasons, is only available within the UK). The resource is described as follows:

BoB is an off-air recording and media archive service. Its scheduling service allows you to record TV and radio programmes that are scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days, as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days from a selected list of recorded channels. BoB’s archive includes thousands of programmes.

Through the BoB service, it is possible to:

  • watch programmes from the BoB archive, (which currently offers tens of thousands of TV and radio programmes)
  • record programmes due to be broadcast in the next seven days
  • retrieve TV and radio programmes from selected channels, which have been broadcast in the previous seven days
  • create and share playlists of programmes
  • create clips from programmes
  • embed clips/whole programmes within NOW

A detailed BoB User Guide is available through the Find Databases listing for the resource in Library OneSearch.

At present there are some technical issues to be aware of when embedding BoB content in other web contexts. These are documented in the brief vid-cast below. It is expected that these issues will be improved in the forthcoming BoB upgrade scheduled for October 2013.
 

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) - embedded content
Box of Broadcasts (BoB) – embedded content

 
To further promote the visibility of the BoB service, a direct link to the BoB homepage is included in the description text for the ‘Books and Audio-Visual’ tab of Library OneSearch (see illustration below):
 
The BoB link in the 'Books and Audio-Visual' tab
The BoB link in the ‘Books and Audio-Visual’ tab

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

TRILT and TVTiP – services offline

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The TRILT (Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching) and TVTiP TV Times Project 1955-1985 services are currently unavailable due to technical problems affecting their web site.

A further update will follow once services have been restored.

RLMS upgrades: improvements, enhancements and new functions

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Details of some of the key improvements to the Resource List Management System (RLMS) being introduced in April 2013, are described in the following short vid-casts (which come complete with audio).

More detailed ‘Change’ reports

 
RLMS - Change report

 

Improvements to ‘List’ view

RLMS - List view

 

My Bookmarks – ‘Citation’ view

RLMS - My Bookmarks - Citation

 

‘My Profile’ – Reading intentions and Notes

RLMS - My Profile - Notes and intentions

 

Improvements to ‘Search’

RLMS - search improvements

Withdrawn resource: Intute web directories

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The range of Intute web directories have been withdrawn from the databases collection of Library OneSearch at ALT request. The Intute service has not been actively updated since July 2011, since then the Intute site has been maintained, but no new resources have been added. The web directories withdrawn from LOS are as follows:

  • Intute
  • Intute: Arts and Humanities
  • Intute: Health & Life Sciences
  • Intute: Science, Engineering & Technology
  • Intute: Social Sciences
  • Intute: Social Sciences, Statistics and Data