Reference at Newman Library

Sign Up for Email Delivery of Blog Posts

Working with the Blogs@Baruch staff, we were able to set up the service again that lets you subscribe to blog posts here as they are published. On the right side of the blog, you’ll see a new “subscribe by email” box where you can enter your email address. Once you submit your address, look for a confirmation email message with a “confirm subscription” link in it that you need to click to complete the process.

Fix Coming This Week for Linking Problems in Gale Virtual Reference Library and Nexis Uni

Later this week, there should be a fix in place for the problems we’ve been seeing over the past few months with Gale Virtual Reference Library and Nexis Uni. This problem always starts with OneSearch records. When the user clicks the “full text available” link for some (but not all) records that are supposed to lead into Gale Virtual Reference Library entries or into Nexis Uni, the user is led to various dead ends.

Gale dead ends

  • a login page from Gale that looks like this one (users should only ever see our remote access login page, and that should only come up when they are off campus)
  • a remote access login page from another CUNY campus
  • a Gale page saying the item can’t be found

Nexis Uni dead ends

  • a login page from Lexis Advance (which we don’t even subscribe to)

Workarounds

Until the fix is in place this week, users should take note of the info from the OneSearch record for the item they want, go to our A-Z databases page, find the link for either Gale Virtual Reference Library or Nexis Uni, connect to the appropriate database, and re-run the search for that specific item.

About the Fix

The source of the problems lay in the updates made by Ex Libris to holdings info about Gale resources and Nexis Uni resources in the SFX system (a system that you also see when you encounter a “Find it! @ CUNY” button in a database record. When you click the “full text available” links in OneSearch, that action uses SFX to figure out what database has the full text and takes you directly from OneSearch to the item in the database (in some cases, the link takes to you to the search page for the database). Ex Libris is fixing errors it made in the way SFX translates incoming requests for full text linking for Gale and Nexis Uni resources into a URL made on the fly that transports the user into the appropriate database. CUNY OLS will apply this fix to our SFX server this week, and we should see the problems disappear thereafter.

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.”

iG Library screen asking for login

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:

Location of News option for search
 

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.

Log In button in SRDS

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.

Search box after logging in

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.

 

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.