Reference at Newman Library

Category: Uncategorized

Updates to OneSearch

Allie Verbovetskaya at the CUNY Office of Library Services (she’s the University Web and Mobile Systems Librarian) shared with the Public Services Committee a list of recent updates to the OneSearch system that we should all be aware of:

On Sunday, August 27, 2017, our instance of OneSearch was updated to the latest service pack release of the underlying discovery software. This was a major update and includes many new or updated features:

  • Email Security Improvements
  • Sticky Facets
  • Multiple Facet Selection
  • Sort in “My Saved Items”
  • Featured Results
  • Support of RSS Feeds
  • Personalized Results
  • Search Expansion with Controlled Vocabulary
  • Resource Recommender

You can read more about these features on the “What’s New @ OLS57” blog: https://ols57.commons.gc.cuny.edu/

If you have any questions about these updates, feel free to ask me about them.

LibGuides Down (including A-Z databases page and e-reseves) UPDATED 6 Sept 2017

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.

Library and College Website Down Briefly on September 1

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).

Slow or No Performance in the E-Journal Portal

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.

New Database: International Encyclopedia of Communication

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.