Just a reminder that there will be a further power outage tomorrow morning from 8-9.30am in Puaka-James Hight and the Macmillan Brown Library. The full details of affected locations are available in Paul O’Flaherty’s email sent out on Wednesday this week.

As per usual, make sure you save everything when you leave today, and either power off your machine or log out and leave it running if you need remote access over the weekend.

Ngā mihi,
Donna
Digital Services

Mōrena,

Digital Services will be short-staffed this week with Romy and Peter both away, so there may be a delay in responding to queries. If you have an urgent problem, please call me on Skype for Business (ignore availability status), or send an email to eServices marked as urgent. Alternatively, I can be contacted on 021 049 9292.

Ngā mihi,
Donna
Digital Services

Mōrena

ITS are reporting that some staff are missing email this morning and are working on implementing a fix. You can follow the progress on the issue from the ITS status page: https://status.canterbury.ac.nz/.

Obviously you might not notice if you’re missing email, but for anyone expecting something that hasn’t shown up, this is the likely cause.

Donna
Digital Services

Mōrena,

We’ll be doing some routine maintenance and re-indexing of the Archives Management System and Kā Kohika today, so they’ll be temporarily unavailable (the web interface and all minisis modules will be unavailable). This is likely to take most, if not all, of today.

If this is going to be a major inconvenience to anyone, please let us know and we’ll reschedule for another time.

Ngā mihi,
Donna

You may have noticed spam posts appearing on Counterculture in the last few days – especially if you’re subscribed to email notifications.

ITS have been investigating the cause, and it looks like public registrations on other UC blogs are automatically allowing those accounts to become authors across all UC blogs. They’re looking into possible solutions.

In the meantime, please just ignore those posts and delete the emails, and we’ll remove them from Counterculture as soon as we can.

Ngā mihi,

Donna
Library eServices

Mōrena,

The UCRR may be unavailable intermittently for about 1 hour from 7.30am this morning while ITS do some maintenance on the server.

We’ll add a comment when the work is complete.

Donna
Library eServices

We’ve embarked on a tidy-up of library Google accounts, as these have grown in a haphazard way over the years. Our goal is to tighten up security, as well as make it simpler to provide access to the tools people want to use. They include many useful features that we could be making better use of, so it’s worth becoming familiar with them.

So what are we using Google products for?

Quite a lot, actually:

• Google Analytics, for recording usage statistics about the library website, Summon, UCRR, Kā Kohika, LibGuides, and LibCal;
• Google My Business, to manage our Google business profile that users see when googling us or getting directions via maps. Includes hours, map locations, photos, user reviews, posts to users, etc. Also includes interesting insights about user behaviour, including how they found us, what action they took (directions, visited the website, phoned us, etc);
• YouTube, to upload videos to our library and Te Rua Makerspace channels (via our Google brand accounts);
• Google Search Console, for keeping an eye on Google index coverage of our websites.

What would we like you to do?

If you’d like to have access to any of the above services, sign up for a Google account (yes, you can just use your UC email address), and let eServices know which products you would like to access. If you’ve been using the eng@libr.canterbury.ac.nz generic account, this will still be available. However, we’ve updated to a more secure password and we’d recommend switching to your own account to avoid Google verification issues that arise when accounts are used on multiple devices.

Further information

We’ll be recording information about our Google accounts on this Camelot page. However, given that Google services tend to change fairly rapidly, we won’t be maintaining detailed information about how to use each service. If you need assistance, contact eServices and we’ll do our best to help.

Ngā mihi,
Donna
Library eServices

Update at 11.15am:

We are pleased to update that our engineers have resolved the service performance issues. All cloud services are now fully operational.

Ex Libris have reported that they are experiencing issues with Summon at the moment:

We are investigating performance issues with our cloud services.

We are doing everything we can in order to solve the issue as soon as possible. We will provide timely updates on this

Summon seems to be working intermittently for now – we’ll report back when Ex Libris have confirmed that it’s fixed.

For those of you who use appointment bookings in LibCal, we’ve now added a Zoom location for you to show your availability for online meetings. If you want to use this, you’ll just need to set up your availability for the Zoom location via the Appointments > Availability menu in LibCal.

Please note – this doesn’t add any extra functionality for connecting to Zoom or providing information for attendees. You’ll still need to contact them with the details of your Zoom meeting.

Any questions, please contact Library eServices.

Ngā mihi,
Donna on behalf of Library eServices

We’re currently experiencing a problem with MultiSearch failing to complete searches. We’re reporting the problem and will update when we hear what/when the solution will be.