Dawsonera timeouts

Please be aware that Dawsonera ebooks will automatically time out after 30 minutes of inactivity. Some of our Dawsonera titles are restricted to a limited number of users at the same time - these will time out after 15 minutes, to make sure other people aren't kept waiting for their turn.

ScienceDirect offline for maintenance Saturday 1st August 11am-3.30pm

ScienceDirect and Scopus will be offline for scheduled maintenance for approximately 4.5 hours starting at 11am on Saturday 1st Augus. If you try to access them during this time you will get a downtime message. This will affect all ejournals with "www.sciencedirect.com" in the URL.

UPDATE: Shibboleth down

Shibboleth fault now fixed!!!. Good work ICT. (Update time: 10.30 am)

It looks like the authentication system known as Shibboleth is down. This is affecting access to our ebooks platforms (DawsonEra and VLEbooks), as well as RefWorks and the private areas of Readinglists.beds.ac.uk. (The public pages of the Readinglists site will still be accessible without logging in.)

Our ICT department are aware of the problem and are working to fix Shibboleth as soon as possible.

Login problems 21st July

We're having some authentication problems this morning, affecting Student Email and digital library resources using UK Access Management Federation login (which includes RefWorks, Reading Lists, Dawsonera and VLEbooks. We hope these will be fixed soon.

Scopus adds nearly 4 million pre-1996 articles and more than 83 million references | Elsevier Scopus Blog

From the Scopus blog:

Breaking the 1996 barrier: Scopus adds nearly 4 million pre-1996 articles and more than 83 million references | Elsevier Scopus Blog

Web of Science upgrade Sunday July 26 - no downtime expected

Please be advised that there will be a release of Web ofScience 5.18 on Sunday, July 26th.

Thomson Reuters advise "This release, which will be live on July 26th, primarily focused on integrating ORCID data into our platform.  We have always supported ORCID’s when they have been attached to a RID, and now we are able to display them individually.  

We do not expect to have any outages or downtime during the release, so everything should be business as usual."

Further information and other release information can be found at:

http://wokinfo.com/news/new/

Web of Science 5.18 Release notes document directly at:

http://wokinfo.com/media/pdf/wos_release_518.pdf

Dawsonera ebooks - problem downloading ebooks in Chrome

This issue will only affect you if you use the download option in Dawsonera, rather than reading online, and use the Chrome browser.

Chrome has made a change to the default application for opening PDFs. It now tries to open them using Chrome, instead of Adobe Reader by default.

There is a way around the problem. Go to the downloaded file (search for downloads on your task bar) and right-click the file, then 'open with Adobe Reader'.

Alternatively, you can go into the plugins for Chrome (to do that just paste 'chrome://plugins/' into the URL bar) and disable the "Chrome PDF viewer" which stops this from happening. Unfortunately there is a side effect to this: it causes the online reader to function incorrectly in Chrome. However, if the you do not use the online reader and download the majority of content then this would probably be a good option.

Dawsonera ebooks - back to normal

We're pleased to report that the Dawsonera ebook service is now back to normal. Please let us know if you have any further problems.

Dawsonera ebooks unavailable

Dawsonera are having a major problem this morning, and all their ebooks seem to be unavailable. Other universities are having the same problem. We have reported this and hope it will be fixed soon.

Security errors in latest verson of Firefox - problem fixed

The problem with security certificates when logging on to resources in the newest version of Firefox has now been fixed. If you do come across any error messages when using our resources, please let us know and we will investigate.

News resources survey

Maverick Publishing Specialists have been commissioned on behalf of ProQuest to conduct some research into user behaviours when using News and Newspaper resources. They would be very grateful if you could take a few minutes to complete the survey. The questions should take no more than 5-10 minutes to complete and all submitted responses will be entered into a prize draw to win an Apple Watch. To open the survey please click on the link below:

https://www.snapsurveys.com/wh/s.asp?k=143651787957

Reading lists back to normal

The Reading list system now looks to be back to normal. Please do let us know if starts looking strange again.

Reading lists display problem

We are currently experiencing a problem with our Reading list system. It is being investigated and hopefully will be resolved soon.

Security errors in latest verson of Firefox

Since the latest upgrade to Firefox (38), a security message appears when trying to login to any UK Access Management Federation (Shibboleth) resource:

This particularly affects

• ebooks (DawsonEra and VLEbooks)
• Reading Lists
• RefWorks 
•  

This issue will also affect UoB student email.

Please direct use IE or Google Chrome instead for the time being.

ICT are currently in the process of upgrading the certificate to overcome the issue. This should also prevent insecure site messages in Google Chrome as well.

Scopus to cease support of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) on October 1

From the Scopus blog:

Effective October 1, 2015, Scopus will no longer support Internet Explorer 8. This is a few months ahead of Microsoft’s official discontinuation date of January 2016. More information on Microsoft’s support page.
By removing IE 8 from our support list we will be able to provide the following future enhancements for you:

• Remove current IE 8 security issues

• Enhance existing security measures

• Add support for new browser technologies

• Add responsive design

• Improve accessibility

In order for our users to continue benefitting from Scopus’ new features and functionalities, we would like recommend that you upgrade your browser to IE 9 or higher or use Google Chrome or Firefox browsers.

DISCOVER - problem with links to BioMedCentral journals

We're having a problem with the automatic linking from DISCOVER to BioMed Central journal articles.

The "Check BioMed Central for full text" link is going to an error page, rather than the full text.We are working on getting this fixed, but in the meantime you can still access the full text by another route. You can search the Library catalogue for the journal title, or, since BioMed Central articles are all Open Access and freely available on the web, just do a Google search for the article title.

Taylor & Francis Online journals - problem fixed

We're pleased to say that the problem accessing full text of Taylor & Francis Online journals is now fixed.

Please let us know if you have any further problems.

ICT essential maintenance - Saturday 11th July

From 7am until approximately 11pm, power in our data centre will be shut down.

All Services accessed inside and outside the University will be affected, including E-mail, BREO, Library Catalogue, DISCOVER, eVision and SiD. There will be no access to any of our
Digital Library resources, even where they are provided by a third party, because our systems for logging in to them will be down. 

Taylor and Francis e-journals - access problem

We are having a problem with access to the full text of Taylor & Francis e-journals (any journal with www.tandfonline.com in the URL). When you try to access an article, you may see this:

Click the Shibboleth link, then choose UK Higher Education, then University of Bedfordshire from the list. You should then get a UoB login page. Unfortunately, you will then be returned to the Taylor and Francis home page, but can search for your article in the search box.

You should then be able to get through to the full text, providing that it is a journal we subscribe to. This issue seems to be affecting all UK universities, not just UoB, and we hope that it will be resolved soon.