We are working to solve this issue.
Year: 2019
Off-Campus Problem with OneSearch Links to Ebooks from iG Library (UPDATED 4 April 2019)
For reasons that I’m still trying to understand, links are failing from OneSearch records to ebooks on the iG Library platform, where we have a collection of books from Business Expert Press. Here what the situation looks like right now:
- On campus (no problem)
- Run a search in OneSearch, find an ebook that happens to be on the iG Library platform, click the “full text available” link, and you’re taken to the book and can access it with no problem
- Off campus (problem)
- Run a search in OneSearch, find an ebook that happens to be on the iG Library platform, click the “full text available” link, get the “remote authentication” page from Baruch, enter your credentials, and you’re taken to the book BUT you can’t actually view the text and there’s a pair of login boxes on the page from iG Library that are only there for individual subscribers (see screenshot below). The page also doesn’t have the usual message in the top right that says “Welcome, Baruch College.”
Here is a sample record in OneSearch for an ebook on the iG Library platform.
Workaround
It may take a few days of back and forth with OCLC to find out why our remote authentication system (EZproxy) is failing for this one set of content (records in OneSearch that lead to ebooks from Business Expert Press on the iG Library platform). For now, we can recommend to our users that they use the link for “Business Expert Press” or “iG Library” on the A-Z databases page to go in the front door of the database and then search for the needed title.
UPDATE 4 April 2019
The problem is fixed (read the details in this post).
Finding News Articles in Westlaw (Thomson Reuters)
Another story in the “unintuitive interface design” category: if you want to search in Westlaw for news articles, don’t run the search from the landing page that our database link first takes you to. If you do run a search from that page, all the results will be from legal materials.
Instead, you’ll want to first click “News” from the options below the search box:
SRDS Access Has Become Quirky
SRDS recently changed the interface for their database that is unlike most others. When you try to connect, it looks like you’re unable to access the database, as the search box is not visible at first. The trick is that you now have to click the purple “Log In” button in the top right corner of the screen.
Once you do that, you are “logged in” even though you didn’t get prompted to type in any user name or password. The search screen is made visible in the right middle part of the interface after you’ve clicked the “Log In” button.
Please note that if you are off campus, you’ll still first see Baruch’s EZproxy login page (AKA, our “remote authentication” page) before you get to this quirky new SRDS landing page.
BankScope Is Now BankFocus
We’ve regained access to BankScope this week. This database from Bureau Van Djik features financial data on 25,000 banks around the world and has now been renamed BankFocus (the change is reflected on our A-Z database page).
Database Trial: Digital Theatre Plus
Through March 19, CUNY has a trial for Digital Theatre Plus. Access is available from on and off campus (look for the link on the Trials tab of the Databases page).
This database offers streaming video recordings of plays performed on stages around the world. The site also offers commentary and analysis of many of the featured works.
Please share news of this trial with faculty you work with and encourage them to provide feedback using the Qualtrics form linked to on the Trials tab of the Databases page.
TableBase Is No More
Gale has pulled the plug on TableBase. We still have access to a wide range of databases that will provide charts and rankings.
OneSearch Now Has Records for Items in Naxos Music Library
Recent updates from Ex Libris now make it possible for searchers to find recordings from the Naxos Music Library in OneSearch. As you can see in this screenshot of a search for “Aguas da Amazonia,” the second item in the results list is a record for the audio file in Naxos:
If you click the title, you’ll get a more complete record. If you click the “Full text available” link in the search results or in the full record, it will take you to the page in Naxos for that album.
At the moment, the label for the link for “Full text available” doesn’t make a lot of sense (something like “Listen now” or “Stream now” would be more appropriate). Instead, all links to indexed content have to use the same link text. Ex Libris hasn’t yet come up with a way that the text can be customized depending on the item content in the record; they are aware of this problem and are planning to fix this in a future release of Primo.
Records for Databases Now in OneSearch
On the chance that someone is mistakenly trying to connect to a database like Factiva by searching for it in OneSearch, we decided to create a way to help that searcher out by giving them an easy-to-find link in the search results. Here’s what it looks like if you search for Factiva:
The green “Full text available” link uses the same proxied URL that is found on our A-Z database pages. If the searcher instead clicks the record title for “Factiva,” they’ll get the OneSearch record for Factiva with more info about the database and the same green “Full text available” link.
This new feature improves on the way we handled such searches in the past. The earlier “resource recommender” system in OneSearch put a link in a special box above the search results if you happened to search for “factiva.” Now you’ll find a record in the first or second position of search results, a more obvious and visible place. In usability tests, I noticed that students typically didn’t notice these “resource recommender” notifications; my guess is that students tuned them out because they’ve learned from search engines that what sits above the search results are ads that usually can be ignored.
CUNY OLS has set up this integration between LibGuides and OneSearch so that the OneSearch system looks at our A-Z database list (specifically, our “database assets in LibGuides”) once a week to harvest the latest set of records about our databases. This regular updating allows the OneSearch system to automatically capture things like:
- name changes we’ve made on our A-Z list
- new databases we’ve added or old ones we’ve cancelled
- new URLs for existing databases
If you’re curious, you can find all the database records from LibGuides in the OneSearch system by searching for BB_LIBGUIDES_DB.
New Option in OneSearch to Search Across CUNY Catalog Records
We’ve made it a bit easier to replicate a “union catalog” search in OneSearch. When you are in the OneSearch interface and begin typing a query, a set of options appears below that let you change the scope of your search, including a new option for “All CUNY.”
If you don’t select one of these scopes but just run the search (by clicking the magnifying glass button in the search box or hitting the “Enter” key), the search will be run in the “Baruch” search scope.
To understand the difference between the three search scopes, this chart compares what can be found in each one:
Please note that the “All CUNY” search scope does not let you find e-resources that are uniquely held by other CUNY libraries but it does let you find what books (particularly print ones) that they may uniquely own.