ALEPH: temporarily unavailable this morning

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

A restart of all ALEPH services first thing this morning, requested by IS yesterday, is taking far longer to complete that was anticipated. The restart should have taken between 10-15mins and began at just after 7am this morning, but new process on version 20 of ALEPH are taking long to run through than has been seen previously.

Currently all connections to ALEPH (including all client connections, self-service and the OPAC) are unavailable.

We are working very closely with IS to resolve this issue as soon as possible, and will update as soon as access to ALEPH has been restored.

Problems affecting on-campus access to external web resources

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

LLR staff and customers working on-campus may continue to experience intermittent problems accessing external databases and online services, pending the resolution of a technical issue affecting the NTU network which our colleagues in Information Systems are urgently investigating.

The problem results in the slow return of some web page requests, and often a time-out “Page cannot be displayed” error. In some instances, refreshing the page in the browser may result in the page loading correctly; but in other cases the site may remain inaccessible.

If you encounter problems with accessing external web sites, please report details of the issue to the eServices team for us to investigate. We may be able to suggest an alternative means of access to the resource, and will also need to confirm that the problem you are reporting is not caused by an unrelated service issue.

A further update will follow once IS has been able to identify and resolve the cause of these difficulties.

If you’ve any questions about this, please contact eServices for more information.

EBSCOhost databases – Shibboleth authentication working once again

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

EBSCOhost have confirmed that the issue affecting their Shibboleth service has now been resolved. Off-campus access to all EBSCOhost databases is once again available by univeristy username and password.

The temporary off-campus access account details provided by EBSCOhost in the interim will shortly be disabled.

All of the service issue icons and customer notifications on EBSCOhost databases have been removed from eSearch.

If you continue to receive reports of any off-campus access difficulties affecting EBSCOhost databases, please report the details to eServices.

Problem affecting off-campus access to EBSCOhost databases

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Off-campus access to databases on the EBSCOhost platform is currently unavailable, due to problems affecting EBSCO’s Shibboleth authentication service. (On-campus access is unaffected).

When attempting to login to an EBSCOhost database from off-campus, the following error message displays:

Session Creation Failure

The inter-institutional access system was unable to successfully build a login session for you at [date and time]

To report this problem, please contact the site administrator at root@localhost. (Please note, there is no need to act on this instruction)

Please include the following message in any email:

Session creation failure at (https://shibboleth.ebscohost.com/Shibboleth.sso/SAML/POST)

Session Creation Error

The databases involved are:

  • Academic Search Elite
  • Business Source Premier
  • EconLit
  • International Bibliography of the Social Sciences
  • Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts
  • PsycARTICLES
  • PsycINFO
  • Regional Business News
  • SPORTDiscus
  • Textile Technology Index

This problem is affecting all UK universities using the Shibboleth framework for EBSCOhost authentication. A further update will be provided once we have received confirmation of a resolution from EBSCOhost.

Loss of ALEPH services on Sunday 29th November

Fay Harrison

We experienced a total loss of ALEPH services for most of yesterday, Sunday 29th November, affecting ALEPH client, Web OPAC and Self Service. This occurred when the directory space allocated for system backups filled up, causing ALEPH to stop working.

Normal service was resumed around 8:00pm yesterday evening.

IS have put measures in place to prevent this from happening again.

Web of Knowledge – access problems resolved

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

Access problems affecting the WoK service reported earlier this week appear to have been resolved. Work by technical staff on the Thomson Reuters team did not identify any specific remote cause for the problem but are continuing to monitor the situation. Please contact Lib eServices if you encounter a recurrence of access difficulties.

New eSearch Sub-Category: Education > Images

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

A new resource Sub-Category has been added to the Education Category in eSearch: Images. This new Sub-Category contains the same 12 images-based resources which are also include in the Art & Design > Images Sub-Category.

New entry for MyiLibrary in eSearch

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

eBook titles available on the MyiLibrary platform are accessible from the library catalogue, where deep-links to individual titles are provided. A new platform level entry for MyiLibrary has now been added to eSearch. When customers access the MyiLibrary platform via this eSearch route, they will be resolved to the home page of the MyiLibrary service from where they can access the search and other facilities provided by MyiLibrary.

GMID – off-campus access restored

Head of Discovery and Digital Futures

The problem preventing off-campus access to the GMID service has now been resolved. On-campus access continues to be direct with off-campus access by university username and password (using Shibboleth). The ‘service issue’ icon displaying in eSearch for this resource has been removed.

Web of Knowledge access problems continue

Fay Harrison

We’re still experiencing problems with access to Web of Knowledge – get ‘Page cannot be displayed’ error message, or the web page doesn’t display correctly.  Thomson Reuters, who provide the technical support for this resource, are investigating the problems.