Temporary suspensions of access to e-resources

Lee Houghton - Resource Applications and Discovery Team Manager
Screenshot of e-resource access block message

To protect against excessive usage that risks breaching our e-resource licensing agreements and also the illegal harvesting of content from compromised accounts, the library imposes a 200MB limit on downloads in a single day.

Setting the daily download allowance at 200MB is an attempt to strike a reasonable balance between the different material file-sizes that staff and students may want to access across different subject areas. It’s a capacity that would allow the download of large numbers of journal article PDFs, but a far smaller number of high-resolution images or multimedia files.

If someone hits this limit, they will be blocked from accessing any more e-resources for 18 hours. If no further action is taken this block expires automatically.

To contact the library to expedite the lifting of a block, email libinfodirect@ntu.ac.uk with the subject line ‘eZproxy services suspended’.

The library will endeavour to unblock accounts in a timely manner before the standard 18 hour expiry but can’t guarantee it during particularly busy periods, or when the block stretches across the weekend or Bank Holidays.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) maintenance

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A scheduled system maintenance period for the Box of Broadcasts platform will begin Tuesday 16th March 2021 from 07.00am. The provider advises that the service should be considered ‘at risk’ from this time until the maintenance has completed.

Resolved: OUP journals – access issues

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

THE ISSUES AFFECTING log in on the Oxford University Press journal platform reported yesterday have now been resolved.

Access to all subscribed content on the OUP journal site is available to staff and students once more.

OUP journals – access issues

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures
An example OUP journal

THE TECHNICAL TEAM behind the Oxford University Press (OUP) journals platform are working to fix a problem affecting login requests.

At present, attempts to log in to the platform either using Shibboleth or eZproxy resolve to a ‘400 bad request’ error page.

A further update will follow once the issue is confirmed as resolved.

Talis RLMS – removal of legacy List View and Edit

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

FOLLOWING AN EXTENDED period of parallel running, the legacy List View and List Edit functions has been withdrawn (11 January) from Talis Aspire.

This means that all list editing, updating and publishing operations in the RLMS now take place within the New List Edit environment.

LLR moved to the New List functionality as a default in September 2019, but the legacy List operations had continued to be accessible since that time.

Talis have completed the withdrawal process now that all customers have moved over to the new style functionality.

Talis have updated walkthroughs for different elements of New List Edit on their site, including guides to:

Also available from Talis is a New List Edit – Overview and a collection of New List Edit – guidance videos.

There are no changes to the way that students access and make use of lists, but guidance for library teams and for list editing academics may need to be updated to take account of the final withdrawal of this earlier version functionality.

ProQuest planned outage on 30 January 2021

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures
Search ProQuest platform

A NUMBER OF ProQuest services will be unavailable during a planned maintenance period beginning at 03:00 and ending by 11:00 on Saturday 30 January.

Of the different ProQuest resources that may be affected for some or all of that period, key ones for customers of Libraries and Learning Resources are:

  • The main ProQuest platform (44 separate databases)
  • Alexander Street Press platform
  • Chadwyck-Healey databases
  • Ebook Central
  • ProQuest Syndetic Solutions (book data enhancement in Library OneSearch)

The RefWorks service is not affected by this planned maintenance period.

The real-time status of all ProQuest services can be checked on the ProQuest Status Page.

Gale and JSTOR database collections updated

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures
Gale Primary Sources

THE FOLLOWING CHANGES to the Gale and JSTOR collections in the library’s Find Databases service have been implemented and are now live.

Gale

British Library Newspapers
Name changed (from ’19th Century British Library Newspapers’); new access URLs deployed; authentication is now by university username and password both on-campus and off-campus; coverage extended to 1732-1950 (from 1800-1899); description updated

New resource: Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals
Accessed by university username and password from on-campus and off-campus.

Picture Post Historical Archive
New access URLs deployed; authentication is now by university username and password both on-campus and off-campus

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection
Name changed (from ’17th and 18th Century Burney Collection’); new access URLs deployed; authentication is now by university username and password both on-campus and off-campus

Times Digital Archive, The
New access URLs deployed; authentication is now by university username and password both on-campus and off-campus; coverage end-date extended from 2009 to 2014

Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive
New access URLs deployed; authentication is now by university username and password both on-campus and off-campus; coverage end-date extended from 2009 to 2014

JSTOR

19th Century British Pamphlets
New access URLs deployed; authentication is now by university username and password both on-campus and off-campus; improved JSTOR landing page incorporated

Refworks – log in issues – 24 Dec 2020

Jill Walker - Applications & Technical Services Team
Refworks homepage

Refworks have reported some log in issues for certain users accessing the new Proquest Refworks.

Their technical team is currently investigating and working on a solution.

**15:12 24 Dec 2020**

Refworks are pleased to report that this issue has now been fixed and the service is operating normally again.

New resource: Artstor

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures
Artstor logo

ACCESS TO THE Artstor digital image library is now available through the Find Databases service.

Students and staff can login to the resource using their university username and password and will then need to register an individual Artstor account.

The new resource is described as follows:

The Artstor Digital Library provides access to a huge collection of high-quality, cross-disciplinary images. These images have been rights-cleared for use in education and research – allowing them to be included in teaching materials, student assignments and other noncommercial educational and scholarly activities. Images can be scrutinised in detail using the built-in viewer; downloaded individually and in groups; and organised into personal collections for future reference. Amongst the large number of collections brought together in Artstor are materials from: The Art Institute of Chicago, Condé Nast, the Jon Schueler Estate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Yale Center for British Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Access to Artstor is currently available until 30 June 2021.

Refworks – scheduled maintenance – 20 December 2020

Jill Walker - Applications & Technical Services Team

Refworks homepage

A scheduled system maintenance period for the Refworks platform will begin Sunday 20 December 2020, between 04:00 and 06:00(UK time).  During this two hour period the following services will unavailable:

  • Proquest Refworks
  • Write-n-Cite (Legacy Refworks and new Refworks)
  • Refworks Citation Manager
  • Refworks Citation Manager – Hangul
  • Refworks for Google Docs

RLMS and eZproxy services working normally once more

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

THE TECHNICAL ISSUES that were affecting authenticated access to the Resource List Management System and to electronic resources using the secure eZproxy service have now been resolved.

Both services are now working normally once again.

Any student or staff member who has encountered either error is advised to close and re-open their browser in order to launch a fresh login request to either or both systems.

Image if a code fragment

RLMS – login currently unavailable

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

THE LIBRARY IS working with providers Talis to recover login functionality in the Resource List Management System (RLMS).

At present, while read-only access to resource list content is unaffected, attempts to log in to the RLMS resolve to a error page indicating that access is ‘unauthorised’.

A further update will follow once login services are working normally once more.

UPDATE, 12:55: The issue has now been resolved.

Talis - 'Unauthorised' error message