News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
The outage for LibGuides reported yesterday late in the afternoon ended early in the evening. All LibGuides (including our A-Z databases page and e-reserves system) are available again.
For future reference, the link to the backup spreadsheet of databases (and their URLs) can be found in the “Databases Overview” page in the Library Services wiki.
The vendor for LibGuides, Springshare, is aware of the outage affecting US libraries. All our guides are inaccessible, including the e-reserves system and the A-Z databases page.
As an alternative for database access, please use this list from Feb. 2017 of databases and links:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Jg-QcofaB0ZO5xVltjxL68RPYGQnJC5fJtrCoj1z50c/edit?usp=sharing
For status updates on the LibGuides outage, see the vendor’s Twitter account @springshare.
UPDATE 6 September 2017: All LibGuides came back online later in the evening of September 5.
On Friday, September 1, from 8:00 am – 8:30 am the Baruch College, MSPIA. and Weissman websites will be unavailable due to required maintenance. This includes the library website.
The LibGuides system will be unaffected, which means users can get to library databases, the catalog, and OneSearch (links to OneSearch and the catalog can be found on the databases list).
Yesterday, we saw the return of a recurring problem with the e-journal portal. Searches took forever or sometimes failed to go through at all. This morning, the system seems to be fine again. The vendor (Serials Solutions) emailed customers yesterday to let us know that they were aware of the intermittent problems over the past 9 months and are still working to permanently fix them.
In case this problem crops up again, we can use a newly developed e-journal tool from SFX that works the same way. This tool is something that the SFX Committee at CUNY is going to be looking at and exploring (is the knowledgebase behind it as accurate and user friendly as the one from Serials Solutions? can the interface be customized as much as the Serials Solutions one? etc.). It is not a replacement, just a back up tool we can use when the Serials Solutions e-journal portal is acting up.
From 6 pm on Friday, September 15, until 11:59 pm on Sunday, September 17, Simmons OneView will be down for planned maintenance by the vendor.
Because this is on a standalone platform and not part of one that aggregates different reference works in one place (like Gale Virtual Reference Library or Oxford Reference Online), I’ve added this encyclopedia from Wiley-Blackwell as its own listing on the A-Z databases page as well as on the database pages for communication studies and for dictionaries and encyclopedias.
If you use the search bar on the library home page or on the SPS page, you’ll see that searches are now going to the new interface for OneSearch. If you run into any problems with OneSearch or have feedback about it, please share it with Mike Waldman or me.
We now have access to the DSM-5 Library. This database from the American Psychiatric Association provides the full text of the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a standard reference work in the mental health field, as well as a handful of other related reference works.
Links to this database can be found on the A-Z page and the psychology databases page.
From 1 pm – 3 pm on Saturday, August 26, 2017, ebooks on the Ebook Central platform (formerly ebrary) will be unavailable due to planned maintenance by the vendor (ProQuest).
The library catalog and the SFX service (which powers the “Find it @ CUNY” button in our databases and the “View Now” button in OneSearch) will be down from 8 am to 12:30 pm on Wednesday, August 2. Here are some workarounds:
To find books and other items we have listed in the catalog
To find the full text of an article found in OneSearch
To find the full text of an ebook found in OneSearch
UPDATE 31 July 2017: CUNY has cancelled this maintenance work. All systems will be working.