The Keyword indexes on the catalogue are having some problems. We have copied over an older set and restarted the searching, but past experience suggests this fix may not last in which case we will need to rebuild the indexes. While the Catalogue will continue to work during this process, keyword searches will not return a full set of results.

The various alphabetical searches (e.g. Title begins with) are not affected.

Thanks, Peter K

Hi everyone,

We need to do some database changes on Thursday morning; this requires stopping and starting the database, so user connections will be dropped and people will need to wait 10 minutes or so then log in again.

The outage should take less than 10 minutes, and will happen between 8.00 and 8.30am. We’ve put a big red notice on the login screen to warn users.

We apologise for the inconvenience, but this will be a very brief outage.

Yours,
Gregor

Gregor Ronald, Educational Technology Consultant, Digital Media Group

If you use Course Code search boxes on your libguides, could you please check them. Max noticed his were no longer working and when I looked I found that some of the Java script behind them had been removed. if you use a course code box and it does not work, either let eServices know or you should be able to fix it.

I can’t display the correct code in Counterculture because it doesn’t like it, but refer to

http://wiki.canterbury.ac.nz/display/LIBRSTAFF/Course+searches

Regards, Peter

From Clifford Lynch who is well respected in the Library IT field

For many in the sciences now the library is essentially a negotiator of site licenses and authentication rights. The authentication stuff is still a little rocky in places, but it is clearly straightening itself out, and the better it gets, the more invisible the role of the library becomes; indeed, in institutions where authentication works well and site licenses are transparent to the local community, there’s often a wide belief that the scientific literature is actually free and just out there on the internet, and that the local library isn’t doing anything. In the humanities things are more complicated. …

In general, if you already have X5 on your PC, installing X6 will upgrade the X5 installation. In most cases you do not have to explicitly uninstall X5.

However, there have been a few cases where this hasn’t worked smoothly. If you find you have both X5 and X6 on your PC and they interfere, ICTS have now provided an option to uninstall X5.

If you go to the Programs and Features part of Control Panel, then click on the left-banner link ‘Install a program from the network’, you will find an additional entry:

Thompson Reuters Endnote X5.01 – Endnote Uninstall which should let you remove Endnote X5.

This should remove X5 for you.

Peter K

Hello

Could you please check the Booking Sheet to see if the laptops in your area are correctly listed. I know changes occurred with the move to Windows 7 (e.g. a reduction in Macs) so am aware the sheet may not longer be accurate.

Thanks, Peter K

Access to the Wiki is down today. Peter Kennedy has reported the problem to ICTS and hopefully access will be restored on Monday.

Thanks,
Angela.

As part of the review of continuing resources, the Library has looked at a variety of options in order to reduce expenditure by 15% for 2013. As a result of this review, INSPEC has been cancelled and access will be lost in the next two to three days.

INSPEC provides citations and abstracts of the scientific and technical literature in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computers and computing, information technology, manufacturing and production engineering. There is significant overlap with SCOPUS and other products. Only 7% of the material indexed is unique to INSPEC, including 89 English language titles.

The review had earlier considered cancelling SCOPUS. There were over 60 submissions from academics and postgraduates indicating that this action would have a detrimental impact on research. The Library then investigated alternative options, which included cancelling INSPEC. There was wide consultation on this, with no strong opposition so long as SCOPUS was retained. A proposal was then sent to SMT, who approved the cancellation of INSPEC.

INSPEC was due for renewal on 1 October 2012. Access was kindly extended by Elsevier while negotiations continued on ScienceDirect, SCOPUS and INSPEC. These negotiations have now concluded with ScienceDirect and SCOPUS being renewed for 2013.

On Thursday morning (starting 9.30) the Meeting Room Booking System is going to be moved to a new server. This requires the underlying database to be moved, some scripts to be changed and web links to be updated.

We hope this won’t take too long but there will be some interruption during this time.

Peter k

Horizon is undergoing some maintenance around lunchtime today (noon – 2 pm) which may make it a little slow.

For those who like technical horror stories, the Horizon server is running with two failed hard-drives. Fortunately they are of the ‘hot-swap’ type which means they can be replaced without shutting Horizon down and the system will slowly reload the data onto discs (this is why there is a slow-down). The first will be replaced at Noon and given time to rebuild before the second is replaced at 1.00 pm.

Peter K