News and tips by and for staff providing reference services at the Newman Library, Baruch College (New York, NY).
We just learned that if a student is in Blackboard and then clicks the “Baruch Library” tab so they can navigate to our databases page and launch a database, they will be unable to launch the premium version (the paid version we subscribe to) of Social Explorer. Here’s a screenshot of the scenario:
If student reports this problem, suggest that they open up a new browser tab or window and use that navigate to the Databases page on the library website before trying to launch Social Explorer.
If you are logged into your Google account when you are searching in Google Scholar, you can now save your citations in the new “My Library” feature. Details on this new feature can be found on the Google Scholar Blog.
If you do happen to use Google Scholar or recommend it to students and faculty, make sure you go to the link on our Databases page for it, as that one is set up so that our “Find It” links will appear next to citations that we have full text for and so that our remote login system is activated if the user is off campus (see this 2012 blog post for details on our setup).
Because of CIS work, remote access may be down intermittently on Saturday 11/16 from 07:00 AM until 3:00 PM.
Over the weekend, remote access to the course reserve system stopped working (on campus access seems to be fine). When you try to connect to course reserves right now, you get the usual Baruch login page, and then, once you’re past that, get an error page from Docutek that looks like this:
We’re contacting vendors (Docutek for the course reserves system and OCLC for the EZproxy software that manages remote access to library resources) to find a way to fix this.
UPDATE (10/28/2013, 3:30 pm): The system is now available again from off campus.
We have signed up for JSTOR’s institutional finder pilot program. This will help our users access content we have access to, in an authenticated manner, even if they are not coming from our database page. This is how it works (from JSTOR):
1. A Baruch College user arrives on a JSTOR article page from a Google search or other referring page
2. An on-campus user will get automatic access to the full-text, but users outside of the Baruch College IP range will be denied access
3. When denied access to the full-text, the user is presented with some options for accessing JSTOR including a link to the JSTOR login page and the Institution Finder ( http://www.jstor.org/action/showLogin ).
4. From there they can search for their institution and follow a link to the Baruch College proxy login page
5. After logging in they are authenticated to JSTOR and will be automatically redirected to the original full-text article.
This should help with the many users who find JSTOR content on the web and then do not know how to get access to its content. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.
BCTC will upgrade the ezproxy server on September 27th 2011 at 8am so users may encounter sporadic problems accessing our resources, especially remotely. The updgrade should take about 1 hour.
We now have IP authenticated access to these two resources, thanks to CUNY OLS.
It can be somewhat misleading as the paid articles have a key next to them, but since we have the subscription, users can click through and access the content.
For those times when our campus network is experiencing an outage, we can refer off campus users to the CUNY Library Services page listing centrally licensed/purchased databases, which allows login via library ID number.
To add to the information from Chistian Keck of BCTC that just came out via email on the faculty-staff mailing list, I’d like to note that the campuswide network outage this coming Monday (Jan. 17) means that the library website will not be available. Although LibGuides and the library catalog will be available (they are not hosted on servers here at Baruch), links to authenticated resources (ebooks, databases, ejournals, etc.) will not work, as the EZ Proxy server we use is located here on campus and will be part of the shutdown.