Reference at Newman Library

Tag: OneSearch

What To Do When SFX and the Catalog Are Down

This weekend, from 6 pm on Saturday (September 7) to 6 am on Sunday (September 8), the servers hosting both SFX and the library catalog will be down for planned maintenance. This will affect not only on the library catalog and the “Find it! @ CUNY” button that pops up in databases but also OneSearch. Here’s how it will change things temporarily and how to work around it.

SFX and the “Full text available” links

Say you’ve just run a search on “turtles’ in OneSearch. In this screenshot of the first four search results in OneSearch, you can see there are green “Full text available” links for each item; these links won’t work at all because SFX is down.

OneSearch results for turtles

(click image to enlarge)

Although SFX is down, that doesn’t mean we can’t get to the full text. Here’s the workaround for each of the four items in the screenshot.

Item #1: Morphology and evolution of turtles

  1. This is an ebook. Click the title of the book to get to the OneSearch record that has the full description of the book.
  2. On the OneSearch record for the book, you can see references to “SpringerLink.” That’s a database we have at Baruch.
  3. Go back to the previous screen to see the OneSearch page with the search results.
  4. Click “Databases A-Z” at the top of the OneSearch page.
  5. Look for “SpringerLink” on the list of databases and click to launch it.
  6. Search in SpringerLink for the book using the book title.

Item #2: Turtles

  1. This is a “reference entry,” which means it’s an entry in one of our encyclopedia databases. Click the title (“Turtles”) to get to the OneSearch record that has the complete description of the reference entry.
  2. On the OneSearch record for the reference entry, you can see a mention near the bottom of “Gale Virtual Reference Library” as the source.
  3. Go back to the previous screen to see the OneSearch page with the search results.
  4. Click “Databases A-Z” at the top of the OneSearch page.
  5. Look for “Gale Virtual Reference Library” on the list of databases and click to launch it.
  6. Search in Gale Virtual Reference Library for the reference entry using the title “turtles.”

Item #3: Turtles

  1. This is an article from a journal. Since you can see the name of the journal, the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association, you don’t need to click through to get more info. All you need is here (the name of the journal and year of publication).
  2. Click “Journals A-Z” at top of the screen.
  3. When the “Journals, Newspapers, & Magazines” page opens up, search for the name of journal to see what database(s) have access to it and what years.
  4. Click to connect to the database that has the year you need and then search within that database for the article.

Item #4: The Turtles

  1. This is another journal article. Use the same steps as for previous item (#3).

The catalog and the real-time availability info in OneSearch

The other part of OneSearch that will be affected by this weekend’s maintenance is connected to the catalog being down. You’ll still be able to find print books and other physical items in our collections by searching OneSearch, but you won’t be able to tell if it is checked out or not. The only workaround is to look for the book on the shelf.

 

 

Catalog Down on July 22

From 6 am – 8 am on Monday, July 22, the catalog will be down for scheduled maintenance (the down time might be closer to just fifteen minutes). This will affect:

  • the “Books (print)” search option in the yellow search bar
  • item availability data in the catalog and OneSearch for things that can be checked out (books, technology, CDs, DVDs, etc.)
  • ability to place holds and requests for items that can be checked out

Off Campus Access to Business Expert Press Ebooks Is Restored

We’ve fixed the problem reported here on March 21 that was preventing off campus users from going from OneSearch records for ebooks from Business Expert Press to the full text on the iG Library platform. The problem turns out to be that when the database company changed the URLs slightly for all the ebooks in that collection, that new URL syntax was not shared with Ex Libris, which stores them in the SFX knowledgebase that we use to connect users in OneSearch from records to the places where full text is actually found.

Thanks to the CUNY Office of Library Services for finding a clever hack to rewrite the ebook URLs in SFX. Next, we’ll work on getting the vendor and Ex Libris to update the URLs in SFX. For now, the hacked solution we have works well enough.

Workarounds When Full Text Available Link Doesn’t Work in OneSearch

If you’re in OneSearch and the green “full text available” link fails to connect you to the full text, there are a number of workarounds you might want to try.

  1. Click “Additional options for finding full text”

Scroll down the record to the “FT Options” section to find this link:

additional options for finding full text
Once clicked, a SFX menu will open in a new browser tab showing other databases where full text may be found.

2. Use the A-Z journal lookup tool from Serials Solutions to verify what database has access (for articles only)

If you’re in OneSearch, the easiest way to get to Serials Solutions is to click the “Journals A-Z” link at the top of the interface.

Link to A-Z journals in OneSearch header
3. Go to the ebook platform where the book should be

If the item is an ebook and the full text link isn’t working, try going to the A-Z databases page, connecting to the appropriate ebook database, and running the search there for the ebook.

If you’re in OneSearch, the easiest way to get to Serials Solutions is to click the “Journals A-Z” link at the top of the interface.

A to Z databases link

4. Report the linking problem

This isn’t a workaround but a plea to share with Michael Waldman and me any OneSearch record that fails to connect to full text. Every OneSearch record should have a “Report it” link you can use to quickly notify us of a problem.

Report it feature in OneSearch

 

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).

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:

Search results

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:

Factiva record in search results

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.”

Search scopes as you type

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:

Search scopes in OneSearch

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.