We’ve recently discovered that barcodes with lowercase characters (e.g. au1694674ab) are causing problems at the self-check machines. These items give borrowers an “invalid item” message and don’t show up on the checkout receipt, but the items get issued to the borrower (without being desensitised).

Library IT are going to fix the existing ones (some 12,000 barcodes), but we want to make sure that new records aren’t created with lowercase barcodes. Please let Library IT know if your barcode scanner is automatically creating items with lowercase characters, and we will reconfigure the scanner for you.

Thanks,
Donna

Network problems experienced yesterday are continuing. Some people have been able to log in, and those who didn’t log out yesterday may be OK, but many people are unable to log in at all (or it takes a very long time) and even if you are logged in, things can be very slow. If you are logged in, don’t log off!

ICTS are working on it, but we don’t have an estimation of when things will return to normal.

We were notified by Statistics New Zealand on Friday that their website was going to change that night. They have totally reorganised their site, leaving a LOT of broken links in their wake. If you are on the nz-libs discussion list, you’ll have read all about it, and the indignation that this has caused amongst librarians.

I’m going through our website now, looking for broken links and attempting to fix them. The biggest problem is that the old links don’t work and the only way of finding the new link is to search for it on their website. If the search finds more than one possible link, I’m having to make an educated guess as to what the correct one is. Deirdre has been working on the links on the catalogue and apart from a few problem ones, she tells me they are mostly now correct.

If you know that you have created links on any web pages to Statistics New Zealand, could you please check the relevant page. If the link doesn’t work, it would be helpful if you searched on the Stats NZ site to see if you can find the new url. Either then let me know of the new link and the page where it should be, or if you can, just fix it yourself.

Many thanks for any help you can give me with this rather thankless task!

Also, a note for owners of LibGuides pages – you’ll need to check these for links to Stats NZ as well. Even basic resources like Table Builder and Census information have changed

Catherine Jane

This arrived recently from Springshare re LibGuides and other products …

Hello LibGuides Admins,

I hope your summer is going well. This is just a quick update on several important LibGuides (and Springshare) developments so please read on. Thanks in advance.

1) We have released several important new LibGuides features, including: RSS feeds, Multiple owners of guides, Moderation of user-submitted links, and Improved search. All these features are already live. You can read about them in more detail at http://support.springshare.com/2009/06/new-libguides-features-for-summer-2009/

2) The long-awaited betas of LibAnswers (http://demo.libanswers.com) and CampusGuides (http://demo.campusguides.com) have arrived (and they look great)! We’d love for you to check them out and give us your feedback, suggestions, and comments. You can read more information about both of these cool new products at http://www.springshare.com/libanswers and http://www.springshare.com/campusguides. Send us a quick note if you’d like to check them out and we’ll create demo accounts for you on either/both systems.

Regards,
-The Springshare Team.

I’ve sent an email to the ICTS helpdesk, but as of 9.40am, have heard nothing back.

You can access the old Camelot at http://camelot.libr.canterbury.ac.nz, but you may have limited success as many of the links are now to the wiki!

Catherine

We seem to be short of news stories for the homepage at the moment. Does anyone have any interesting news that would like to put on the Library homepage? Please send any articles to Library IT.

Thanks,
Donna

This morning staff are able to login and get to the K: and P: drives. Horizon and most Library services are working. Email is working. Any work done on K: or P: on Friday has been lost.

Do not change any records in Digital Library or the UC Respository until further notice.

Most student systems are working, except for money handling. The Cash reload stations should work but EFTPOS and the Web are down. Students have lost two days of their email

The new Camelot wiki is down.

For further information keep reading Counterculture. Also look on the ICTS Website.

Report problems to Library IT as there are probably lots of unexpected issues we are yet to find.

Cheers, Anne

If you are reading this you are probably on a PC that managed to login or has remained logged in since Friday. DO NOT log out. Keep reading Counterculture for advice.

ICTS have had a major crash of the SAN that runs may of the file systems and applications on campus. They are restoring some services to an older SAN from backup. For more details on problems see the ICTS website..

Horizon, the catalogue, database access and most Library services are working. There have been no notices run since Friday. EFTPOS and web deposit of funds to CS Gold are not working, but the cash reload stations are. Most other student systems are working but Blackboard was down for two days.

Do not update Digital Library or UC Research Repository until further notice. The digital objects are stored on the SAN. Both systems are still working but may fail and/or may need to be restored from Friday.

Any work done on Friday on the K: or P: drives has been lost as these drive have been restored from backup. Currently these drives are not available. Once the P: drive comes back you will be able to login without problems. In the meantime you can get to email via the web on PCs that are logged in. The Wiki is also not available.

There will be lots of other problems. Report them to Library IT as you find them.

more later – Anne

You may have noticed that it can take a while to connect to the Factiva database. Searches, once you have connected to the database, are reasonably fast, but the actual initial connection can be slow.

I’ve been talking to the Proquest Technical Support people about this, and sent them the url to have a look at Camtasia videos that I made which showed how long it takes to connect. We suspected that the slowness of connection was caused by the number of javascripts that have to be downloaded to create the web page, which on this side of the world can make a big difference to how fast (or slowly) the page loads. The videos, and the results of a trace route command that I ran for them, seem to have convinced them that we are correct, and they have now “logged a suggestion to have the structure re-worked to better allow for that connection”. They did admit that this might be a long process, so we may have to wait a while before we see any improvement.

However, it does demonstrate that it is worth following up with suppliers to let them know that they need to consider connections to this part of the world, where internet connections are more complex and can slow down connections if the web page design does not take this into account. The Camtasia videos are a particularly effective way of convincing the suppliers of what is actually happening, particularly when they try to put the blame on ezproxy. So do contact Library IT if you think a particular database is continually unreasonably slow, and we will try to follow this up with the supplier.

Catherine Jane

The new Law subject guide on LibGuides has had a comment posted (about 3 hours after it was published) that is not at all complimentary about the design. It is headed “Poor design of this page by Monty” and reads:
“The top third of this page is a relatively large blurry picture, a line that says subject guide, another line that says subject guide, a third line that says subject guide, a line of marketing and a line with the ‘url’ of the page we are already on and a button in case we should want to share a library page on a social network. The things that are actually useful are small, squashed together and blue letters on a blue background. Poor design.”

We can’t do much about some of these criticisms, but one thing we can do is eliminate the line he calls the “line of marketing”. This is the description that goes with the guide. Law have already removed it from their guide. It has been suggested that all guides should have this description, but I wonder if they really are adding value, considering how much space they take. By the time someone has actually got to the guide, I’m sure they know why they are there, why they’ve chosen this particular guide and what the subject is about.

I suggest that they are all removed.

Catherine