With the latest Primo release, the interface in OneSearch now features an A-Z way to browse journals by title (it’s just below the search box on the Journals page). Given the vast number of periodicals we have online access to, the A-Z route isn’t an efficient way to look up a title. For my test today, I went looking for the literary journal Callaloo and found that it was title number 850 in the C’s; that was a LOT of paging through results to verify that we do indeed have access to Callaloo (and that was after I changed the default display from 10 items per page to the max of 50).
Tag: OneSearch
Links to Unpaywall from OneSearch Records
Unpaywall is a third-party service that helps identify materials that may be available somewhere in an open access format. In OneSearch, it is set up so that if an item is only available to us in an open access format, a link to it will be made available in the item record in the “View Online” portion, as can be seen in this sample record:
If you click through to the permalink for this record in OneSearch, though, and then click the link for Unpaywall, you’ll see that the item in question is actually not open access (the accompanying videos are but the text of the conference paper is not). Unpaywall sometimes makes mistakes like this (a false positive) about the OA availability of an item. Please report each one of these false positives you find so that the OLS Discovery Working Group can consider whether this integration of Unpaywall is worth keeping.
Statista Content Now Discoverable in OneSearch
While it isn’t easy to find, it’s now there. Records for it most commonly can be found it you filter by one or more of the following resource types in OneSearch:
- Datasets
- Reports
- Images
- Market Research
If you’d like to see everything from Statista that is discoverable in OneSearch, this search link will run a search to find all items with Statista in the Creator field.
Refreshed Design in OneSearch
The CUNY Office of Library Services launched a refresh of the fonts used in OneSearch today. We haven’t yet received an overview from them of all the changes, but things look a bit more structured and legible than before. A number of elements are now in bold to help give the page more structure.
If you have any suggestions about OneSearch regarding its design or functionality, let me know so I can pass that on at the Library User Experience Committee meeting next Tuesday.
Disruptions to Remote Access and Patron Accounts in OneSearch on May 20
CUNY CIS will be doing scheduled maintenance work on Saturday, May 20, to the CUNY Login system between 10 AM and 3 PM. During this time, users may not be able to:
- log into the patron account system in OneSearch that would let them request delivery of books from other CUNY libraries, renew loan periods, etc.
- log into library databases and e-resources from off campus (on campus access should be unaffected for all databases and e-resources except for O’Reilly ebooks and the FitchConnect database)
Books24x7 Records Temporarily Removed from OneSearch
As of today, we’ve temporarily removed all records for Books24x7 from OneSearch. Since last semester, we’ve been working with the vendor on restoring access to this ebook collection. Previously, the link to Books24x7 in the OneSearch records included a note indicating the collection was temporarily unavailable. That message was often not seen by our users, so to prevent further confusion we decided to pull the records out of OneSearch until access is restored. There is some overlap among the Books24x7 collection with the O’Reilly and the Ebook Central collections, so many titles are still available on other platforms and still discoverable in OneSearch because of that overlapping availability.
New in OneSearch: Direct Linking
All instances of OneSearch across CUNY now feature a shortcut to the full text (or streaming content). From the search results page, clicking the green “Available Online” link will open a new tab that takes you to the content itself. Clicking on the item title in the search results page will continue to open up a display of the full item record.
In an email to the Library UX Committee today, Allie Verbovetskaya, the University Director of Library Systems at the CUNY Office of Library Services, added important additional information about this new feature:
If there are multiple full text options for a record, the system chooses the first one on the list of links in the “View Online” section. The list of links is ordered: the E-Resource Management Committee ensures that resources with dependable, item-level links are near the top and resources with poor linking (looking at you, Lexis Nexis!) appear near the bottom of the list.
There are some exceptions to this behavior:
(1) When the record’s services contain a note, the “Available online” link won’t open the full text but will, instead, take patrons to the full record display in OneSearch. The notes provide additional information (e.g., “This is an open access title and full text may not always be available” or “This link will take you to a search box in Nexis Uni where you can run searches for articles from this source”) that we want the user to review because it may impact their experience in the target database.
(2) Records for journals (not articles) will aways open the full record display in OneSearch (and not take the user to the full text) because there may be multiple options with various coverage dates—and we want the user to decide which link works best for them.
As an example of exception (1), look at how this search results page for Oxford World’s Classics: Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War offers an “Available Online” link that takes you to the full item record instead of the full text because there is a note in our record on the database link alerting users that the ebook is limited to one concurrent user.
Problems with Linking from OneSearch to EBSCOhost Databases (resolved)
2 June 2022 update: This issue has been resolved (EBSCO’s new URL for its OpenURL service needed to be shared with Ex Libris and set up in Alma for all Ex Libris customers).
Links going from OneSearch to EBSCOhost databases are failing, generating a “connection timed out” message that, depending on your browser, will look something like this one from Firefox:
This problem has occurred in the past (see this August 2021 blog post) and then got fixed by EBSCOhost. As a workaround, when you are in OneSearch dand need to get to an item that is on an EBSCOhost database, use our A-Z database list to go to the main search page for that database and do a search to find that specific item in the relevant database.
New in OneSearch: Ejournal Holdings Summaries and CUNY Academic Works Records
Ejournal Holdings Summaries
Until yesterday, if you wanted to find out what years of online coverage we had for a given periodical, you had to use the “Journal Search” feature in OneSearch, then click through from the results page to view a full record, and then eyeball the list of databases where holdings details are available. Now, there’s a shortcut. When you run a search, you’ll see on the results page a summary of online holdings for each periodical that has any:
When you first see the search results of a journal search, it may take a few seconds for the online holdings summary to load after the “Available online” text. If you click through to the journal record, you’ll see the same summary statement at the top of the record. You can see this from the links below:
As you can see from the sample journal record for Developmental Psychology, if the journal also has print or microform holdings, those don’t display tidy summary statement at the top of the record or in the brief display in the search results; for that info, you’ll still need to scroll down to the Locations section of the record.
CUNY Academic Works Records
When we moved from Primo to Primo VE in August 2020, we lost the ability to have OneSearch index records in CUNY Academic Works. That feature is now finally back thanks to work by CUNY OLS.
OneSearch Tip: Filtering for Images from Artstor
A recent update from Ex Libris finally let us index our Artstor records in OneSearch. To find images from Artstor in OneSearch, just use the “Images” filter after you run a search. Here’s an example of a search that I ran for the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and then limited it to “Images.”