Dawsonera ebooks - downtime on Sunday 19th April 2.30-15.30pm

Dawsonera ebooks will be unavailable for up to one hour between 14:30 and 15:30 BST on Sunday 19th April whilst British Telecom undertake essential work on the internet services.

Dawsonera will be offline during this time and students should ensure they have downloaded and opened any ebooks they need access to before this outage occurs.

It will not be possible to read titles which have been downloaded but not opened before the outage period.

From 15:30 on Sunday, 19th April all systems will resume and normal processes may continue.

Discover & Ebsco databases now restored

The issue was Ebsco's servers and they sent apologies for any inconvenience caused.Universities across Europe were affected, apparently.

If you have any problems over the weekend, call our helpdesks on 01582 743488 or 01582 793189 or email library.technical@beds.ac.uk.

Discover & Ebsco databases: technical problems

We have alerted our supplier EBSCO to the '504 Gateway Timeout' messages that are affecting access to

• Discover
• Academic Search Elite
• AMED
• Art Full Text
• Business Source Premier
• CINAHL
• Communication & Mass Media Complete
• Education Research Complete
• Hospitality and Tourism Complete
• PsycINFO
• SocINDEX
• SPORTDiscus

They are treating the issue as urgent and are investigating.

Some people report that they can get into these products using the browser IE so if your usual internet browser is Firefox or Chrome, try that instead. No problems have been reported with Safari so far.

Access to the EBSCO Electronic Journals Service and EBSCO Ebooks seems unaffected as well.

Problem with the 'Linked Full Text' links on DISCOVER & away round it

Unfortunately, the Linked Full Text link for results on DISCOVER has stopped working. We have reported to the fault to the service providers and asked them to correct the fault as a matter of urgency.

But do not despair! The links to all the electronic journals from the library catalogue are still working. So, if you have found a reference to an article on Discover like this one

You have all the citation details: 

O'Bannon, B, & Thomas, K 2014, 'Teacher perceptions of using mobile phones in the classroom: Age matters!', Computers & Education, 74, pp. 15-25

The article is in the journal ‘Computers & Education’. Click on the link with the tulips symbol next to it to find the journal on the Library Catalogue. Then follow the onscreen links to find volume 74 published in 2014. The article starts on page 15.

If you have any problems with this during the day, pop along to the Study Hub helpdesk and one of our Academic Liaison Librarians or call your ALL. Out-of-hours, our Reader Services team will be happy to help you.

But we hope that EBSCO (who provide DISCOVER) will fix the problem very soon. Thank you to everyone who reported the problem overnight.

VLEbooks download problem

We have a problem with the download to device function for our ebooks on the VLEbooks platform (reading online is still functioning correctly). The drop-down list of the days you can choose to download for is wrong, and does not allow you to choose a number within the range set. We are hoping that this will be fixed very soon. The read online function is working correctly so you should still be able to access the books you need. As ever, if you come across a problem please let us know.

Newsbank interface - changes now in place

Newsbank have enhanced their interface to make it easier to navigate:

NewsBank’s enhanced interface provides easier and quicker access to content and features
functionality to help utilize the articles retrieved. Included are more ways to filter data for greater relevancy, precision and comparability as well as simplified search options. Frequently-used functions can now be accessed with fewer clicks.
Overview of Interface Enhancements:
Searching:
• More navigators by which the content can be explored
• Searches can be refined either before or after conducting a search
• Searches can be edited directly on the search form which remains at the top of the result list

 Navigation:
• Tool Bar for access to Search History, Document View History, Saved Articles (My Collection) and Other NewsBank Products is available on all screens
• Email, Cite and Print commands are more prominent on the article page
• Add to My Collection, Print or Email are available under each article on the results page
• Source Type icons appear in each article returned on the search results page

 Functionality:
• Result list can be sorted before or after entering a search
• URLs for all screens are persistent and can be bookmarked for future use
• Citing requires fewer clicks to get to a preferred format, and more formats are available
• The Browse Issues option is accessible from within articles
• Two options to return to the beginning screen are available: Clickable NewsBank Logo and New Search link under logo
• Enhanced source list provides the ability to search for titles and information about sources

Questions and Comments:
• Reply to the survey at the top of the screen or click the Contact Customer Service link
• Access the multimedia Help section at the top of the screen in your NewsBank resource

 There is also an introductory video. If you do have any problems, let us know.

WebPrint service unavailable this afternoon, 2.30 - 5pm

The WebPrint service will be unavailable due to system maintenance this afternoon from 2.30. Services should be back by 5.00pm (hopefully earlier). Existing print jobs should not be affected.