New resource: British Periodicals 1680s-1930s

The British Periodicals collection, which provides access to full-text electronic facsimiles of more than 500 journals and periodicals publilshed between the 1680s and the 1930s has been activated in eSearch. Access is direct on-campus, and by university username and password from off-campus. The resource is described as follows:

British Periodicals provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images.

Among the periodicals in included in British Periodicals are titles founded, edited or regularly contributed to by a host of important figures – Walter Bagehot, Aubrey Beardsley, Annie Besant, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Frances Power Cobbe, William Cobbett, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry Fielding, Ford Madox Ford, Oliver Goldsmith, Leigh Hunt, Jerome K. Jerome, Samuel Johnson, Sir Roger L’Estrange, G. H. Lewes, Harriet Martineau, Edward Moore, John Morley, John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, W. M. Rossetti, Sir Richard Steele and Tobias Smollett to name but a few. In addition to providing access to the original periodical versions of landmark texts like De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, Cobbett’s Rural Rides, Bagehot’s The English Constitution, Gaskell’s North and South and Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, the collection offers new ways of exploring the inaccessible, neglected or forgotten writings that formed their original contexts. A wide array of different types of periodical are represented, from magisterial quarterlies and scholarly and professional organs through to coterie art periodicals, penny weeklies and illustrated family magazines.

The British Periodicals collection can be remote-searched and meta-searched in eSearch. Titles in the collection have been activated in SFX, and individual catalogue records for these items will be added to the Library Catalogue at the next update of ejournal records.

A guide to using Shibboleth authentication for the service from off-campus has been added to the eServices Support wiki.

Withdrawn resource: Knovel

LLR’s subscription to the Knovel collection of electronic books concluded at the end of January 2010. All listings of the resource have been withdrawn from eSearch, along with all entries for Knovel eBooks in SFX. All of the individual eBook catalogue records for Knovel titles will be withdrawn shortly.

eBrary – Academic Complete records withdrawn from the Library Catalogue

Following the previously announced changes to LLR’s subscription to eBook content on the eBrary platform, all of the individual eBook records for all titles in the eBrary Academic Complete collection have now been withdrawn from the Library Catalogue. The remaining eBrary eBook records in the OPAC are for the titles within the new eBrary Custom Collection (which LLR is building in preference to the Academic Complete collection).

New Shibboleth guide in eServices Support wiki

Guides to using Shibboleth authentication on the ACS – American Chemical Society and InformaWorld ejournal platforms have been added to the eServices Support wiki.

New ejournal platform: Informa Healthcare

Following the recent re-organisation of content on the InformaWorld platform, access to several electronic journals previously available through InformaWorld have been migrated to the Informa Healthcare site. An example of such a title is: Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics. Access to subscribed content on the Informa Healthcare platform is direct on-campus and by university username and password (using Shibboleth) from off-campus. A guide to accessing the service using Shibboleth has been added to the eServices Support wiki.

New ejournal platform: Human Kinetics

Access to a small number of electronic journal titles on the Human Kinetics platform has been activated in SFX. Access is direct on-campus; no off-campus access is currently available. An example of such as title is: Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology.

Key Skill: Animal Anatomy and Physiology Collection – registration problem resolved

A problem which was preventing new students from registering to use the Key Skill: Animal Anatomy and Physiology Collection has now been resolved.

EBSCOhost database: on-campus links in eSearch not resolving to correct database option

The eServices team is working with EBSCOhost technical support to resolve a problem with is causing on-campus (IP authenticated) links from eSearch to EBSCOhost databases to default to the Academic Search Elite (ASE) search screen.

eSearch database level links to the following services, will all resolve to the same ASE interface.

* 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

Pending a resolution of this problem, please select the ‘Choose Databases’ link in the main search screen (see illustration below) and use the tick boxes in the pop-up window to select the appropriate database/s.

This problem is not affecting off-campus access to EBSCOhost databases or deep-linking to individual journal titles and article content via SFX.

SFX Inter-Library Loan requests now through Library Catalogue

Inter-Library Loan requests sent from the SFX (Find it @ NTU) service (see illustration below) are now submitted through the My Library Card section of the Library Catalogue.

When a customer clicks on this service in the SFX menu, they will be resolved to the Log in to My Library Card page of the Library Catalogue (unless they already have an active catalogue session running). Once their login has been accepted, the customer can select the My Library Card and then the Inter-Library Loans options to complete their request using the online form.

At present, SFX does not auto-populate the online form with the bibliographic data (as was the case previously with the ILLOS service). A refinement to SFX being released by Ex Libris in February is expected to reinstate this functionality.

Elsevier Science Direct – issue affecting SFX linking

A minor upgrade to the Elsevier Science Direct platform has inadvertently led to all outbound SFX links generating an error. (The issue is affecting all SFX customers of Science Direct, globally).

When a vistor clicks on an SFX (Find it @ NTU) link on a Science Direct result page (see illustration below) an error message appears in the new browser window: Not found: The requested object does not exist on this server. The link you followed is either outdated, inaccurate, or the server has been instructed not to let you have it.

eServices is in contact with Elsevier technical support, and will advise once the problem has been resolved.

Temporary workaround

For any LLR colleagues urgently needing to send Elsevier citations to SFX in the meantime, please follow these technical steps. (This is only a temporary workaround pending a resolution of the problem by Elsevier):

* The error occurs because the Science Direct platform is currently generating a malformed OpenURL. To correct this and create a valid SFX URL copy-and-paste the URL from the pop-up SFX window into Notepad or other text editor. The URL will appear in this format:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/http%3A%2F%2Fsfx.ntu.ac.uk%2Fsfxlcl3?sid=Elsevier:SD&genre=article&issn=09537112&date=2004&volume=15&issue=3&spage=143

* Remove this section of the URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/http%3A%2F%2Fsfx.ntu.ac.uk%2F

* Replace this section of the URL with: http://sfx.ntu.ac.uk/

* This will create a correctly formatted OpenURL:

http://sfx.ntu.ac.uk/sfxlcl3?sid=Elsevier:SD&genre=article&issn=09537112&date=2004&volume=15&issue=3&spage=143

* Copy-and-paste this URL back into the address bar of the pop-up browser window and hit Return on the keyboard

* A full SFX menu of services should load

* If you encounter any problems using this workaround, please send a copy of the affected OpenURL to Lib eServices

eBrary – access problems resolved

eBrary’s technical team report that the issue affecting access to eBook content on the platform (25 January) has now been resolved, and all relevant content should now be accessible once again. Please contact eServices it you encounter any further problems with access.

eBrary – access problems affecting eBook content

eBrary’s technical team is working to resolve a problem which is causing access problems to eBook titles on the eBrary platform.

Some customers clicking on links to eBrary eBook titles in the Library Catalogue will see their browser resolve to the eBrary site with the following error message:

The URL entered or pasted is not one we recognize. If you copied and pasted the URL to get here, please double check the format. Make sure all the terms are there and that the URL contains no spaces or return characters.

Not all requests result in the error, and eBrary’s technicians currently believe that the Internet Explorer browser in more susceptible to the problem than Firefox – and recommend trying the Firefox browser in preference (though this will not guarantee successful access).

A further update will follow once eBrary’s technical team has confirmed that the problem has been resolved.