If you use remote access to connect to your work PC this note from ITS is important:

ITS has identified a known issue with the latest version of Firefox (52.0.1) which blocks the plugin for UC Remote Access (go.canterbury.ac.nz). Unfortunately there is no current fix available. We recommend customers either use Internet Explorer (not Edge) for Windows, or Safari for Mac. Alternatively, do not update Firefox to the latest version.

Please note that we have no current supported solution for Linux users. We will be looking into this as a matter of urgency and will advise when we have a supported version.

If you have problems reported about getting to the full text of electronic resources, the problem is probably with Amazon AWS. This mass storage facility is used to store full-text by a number of providers including Elsevier and Proquest.

Apparently it is being restored at the moment but we don’t know how long that will take.

***UPDATE – 22nd Feb – This issue appears to have been fixed now by our Multisearch vendors***

For several days, libraries overseas have been reporting problems with Summon (and Primo) links to ScienceDirect articles. We have now seen our first example.

The error message that comes up is:

Sorry, your request can not be processed due to a system problem. Contact the Help Desk if the problem persists. [SD-009]

Proquest and Elsevier are both working on this problem. Some libraries report that diacritics or punctuation in the title may be to blame but I’ve not been able to confirm that.

In the meantime, if asked about this, recommend searching for articles directly through ScienceDirect as this should still work.

Peter K

Hi Everyone

ITS have been increasing the spam filtering. You may be interested in their notes below:

ITS has continued to investigate additional options of filtering/blacklisting inbound emails, and today we are adding extra layers of filtering via external companies.

You may be interested to know that the University receives approximately 150000 email messages a day. Of these, our previous setup blocked approximately 75000 spam messages (via an external company), with another approximately 25000 messages then blocked by our internal PreciseMail spam filter.

If you know of an email that you should have received that has been blocked, please log a request via the Self Service Portal and include the email address of the sender.

For those of you interested in the trends in Library Management Systems, Marshall Breeding’s 2016 survey results are available here.

Lots of interesting graphs for those who like such things.

Peter K

Endnote X8.01 has now been ‘published’ to the Software Centre. If you find it there, you can install it. There is no uninstall option for previous versions, but this shouldn’t be an issue – it seems to over-write X7 OK.

I don’t think there is a downloadable version available yet – and the whole download area is a bit problematic at the moment, so we’ll see if we can work with ITS to tidy that up.

For the first time, ITS have managed to build our UC styles and filters into the distribution so that should help. New UC versions will still need to be downloaded from the “N:\” drive.

Peter K

Both MB and Lending in Central have reported problems with links to the Operations folder on our K: drive. I’ve looked and there are two copies of it, both in the wrong place, and both missing content.

I’ll start merging the two and hopefully that will give us everything back. Should be done by 10 am today (Friday). If, after that, you find stuff missing, let me know.

Thanks, Peter K

This morning a number of changes are being made to Horizon and our catalogue to give distance students and staff additional options when they request and borrow items.

There will be a new location called Postal Services. Note that this will have the old Law Library code ‘l’ so if you are looking at reports and see location ‘l’, this now refers to the Postal Service.

Distance students and staff will now be able to choose to have things posted to them (the ‘Postal Service’) as before, or to  pick items up from a branch if they are going to be on campus.

The locations ‘l’ and ‘t’ (i.e. Postal and Education) have been linked so that items held for ‘Postal Service’ should be able to be checked-in at Education without transit requests being created.

The horizon logic behind all of this is very complex and we expect some issues to arise which is why we are doing it now. If you come across anything that seems to be incorrect, let eServices know.

Rā and Jan at Education have the most knowledge about this new process and may wish to publish more details in future.

Some of our catalogue records link through to publications held in the NDHA.

An example is Canta

These links are broken everywhere e.g. our Catalogue; WorldCat. Clicking on them will come up with a message: “no records match your search criteria”.

This a consequence of the National Library changing library systems. They are working on fixing this and hope to have redirects in place by mid-October – longer term they will offer replacement records with a new more permanent url.

They do apologise.

I don’t know whether any of us are affected, but this is a recent memo from ITS:

Over the last few days the IT Service Desk has been asked to refund printing charges for staff who have used their student IT account rather than their staff IT account. Can you please remind all of your casuals and fixed term staff who are also students to use the correct IT Account when printing.