British Standards Online – off-campus access restored

Off-campus access to the British Standards Online (BSOL) service has been restored. On-campus access remains direct; and off-campus access is now by university domain, username and password. Despite extensive efforts, it has not proved possible to enable either Shibboleth or eZproxy authenticated access to BSOL, so LLR has agreed an alternative arrangement with the providers based on a secure ‘referral URL’.

This is how this works:

When an off-campus customer clicks on the link to British Standards in eSearch, they will be directed to a special BSOL login page. That page contains the actual login link, and a guide to how to complete the two different styles of pop-up login boxes that may appear (depending on the settings on the local off-campus PC). Once the the login has been successfully completed, off-campus customers will be presented with a page indicating that they have successfully logged in.

Clicking on the ‘Launch British Standards Online now‘ link in that page, will open up a logged in session on the British Standards Online service.

Because the customer has to login to the service, and because off-campus access to BSOL is only available through the secure eSearch link, it is not possible to omit any of the steps or to bookmark a page part-way through the process. Because it is the ‘referral URL’ link itself which authenticates the off-campus customer, LLR has to protect this link behind a secure login (to ensure that only current students and staff members can access it).

British Standards Online – access restored

Access to the British Standards Online (BSOL) service has been restored (following the loss of search functionality earlier this week). If you experience any further problems with BSOL, please contact eServices.

British Standards Online – standards search unavailable

eServices is working with IHS and BSOL to re-establish access to the standards search services within the British Standards Online platform, which is currently unavailable. It is hoped that a resolution for this problem will be available shortly. In the meantime, a prompt has been added to the information icon in eSearch for British Standards indicating that access to the search facility is not available at present.

British Standards Online – access restored

Access to British Standards Online has been restored, with links in eSearch updated to reflect the migration to the new BSOL platform. Access on-campus and off-campus is by Athens username and password.

British Standards Online – access problems

Following the migration of the British Standards Online service to a new domain and platform, Athens authenticated access to the service has ceased to operate for the majority of educational customers of the service. BSI hope to have a resolution for this problem by Tuesday-Wednesday of this week.

In the meantime, BSI have provided LLR with a temporary username and password which will allow staff and students to continue to access the service on the old platform.

To use these temporary credentials:

1. Contact eServices for the temporary username and password
2. Access British Standards Online via eSearch as normal
3. From the list of links in the ‘Navigate’ section on the left-hand side of the BSI home page, select Login
4. Enter the username
5. Enter the password

Once Athens authentication is working normally, links in eSearch will be updated to direct customers to the new platform.