For those of you are interested in what is happening with trends in library technology – and especially, what is happening with Library Technology companies might be interested in this American Libraries report:

2021 Library Systems Report: Advancing library technologies in challenging times

It used to be that if you used Internet Explorer or older versions of Edge, you could click on a file link in CounterCulture (e.g. to a file in the K: drive) to open it. This didn’t work in other browsers.

The latest version of Edge no longer supports this function. Internet Explorer still lurks on your machine, but it is old, insecure, and largely unsupported. At some stage it will probably disappear.

Because of this, it is probably now best to put the file path to the file in full – by all means create a link as well, but having the file path means we can navigate to find it.

This is a short-term issue, but if you are used to replying to, or forwarding, email from a shared email account you may find this fails with a ‘permissions’ error.

In the short-term you will need to click the ‘from’ box and select your own name for this to work

This will be fixed once the move to the new Exchange Server has been finished but that is likely to be a few weeks away.

If you really don’t want to do that, use the Web form of the email because that will work as before. Of course, there is an added complication – how do you find the Web form. It will look like this:

https://exchange.canterbury.ac.nz/owa/collections@libr.canterbury.ac.nz/

where the collections@libr.canterbury.ac.nz part gets changed to the shared email account of interest. You use your own login.

If you don’t know what the underlying email address is, I can find that for you.

Peter

Once your email has been migrated to the new Exchange server (probably today or tomorrow), your appointment links in your Subject Guides will no longer synchronize with your Outlook calendar. To fix this:

1.  Log in to LibGuides
2.  In the banner, use the left hand drop down menu to select LibCal
3.  Still in the banner, click on Appointments
4.  Click on the tab ‘Integrations’ and scroll down to the Outlook/Exchange Settings. Use the section entitled Password Authentication Outlook/Exchange Settings
5.  Click on Disconnect – this will clear all settings.
6. Insert the new settings as shown in the screen shot (click on it to make it larger). Note that this now uses your email address (in three places!), not your username.
7. Click on the ‘Save’ button then on the ‘Test & Verify your Connection’ button. If this fails please let us know.

Last year ITS started to move email accounts to a much newer (cloud based) server. It is the Library’s turn now. This is later than we’d hoped, but better now than in a couple of weeks.

For most of us, there will be no obvious change. I’ve been on the new server since November and you can’t see the difference.

While the link for Outlook on the Web changes, web access works as before and hasn’t caused any problems.

Most accounts move across without any problems – but for maybe 1 in 30 something goes wrong and usually this is because the PC is running and logged in overnight. ITS staff will be present and available to help if that happens.

You will receive instructions from the project manager, Stephen Dunn. Look at them carefully – they aren’t complicated but have basic instructions for the change-over.

Peter

The February issue of Scientific American had an interesting editorial on ‘Psychological First Aid’. This is not a new area, but has become more important with COVID having been responsible for increased anxiety and depression. The course is analogous to normal  first aid courses in that it teaches people what they can do, and more importantly, what not to do if they find themselves having to help somebody having psychological problems.

The State Library of New York teaches this to their ‘Public Safety and Health’ Care students but they have now started to teach it to their Librarians “who have become frequent confidantes to patrons experiencing extreme stress”

Johns Hopkins offers a free online course if you are interested.

First, this is to let you know it is possible to capture any white-listed addresses you have in PreciseMail and to move them to Junk Mail.

Second, this is not a detailed guide – come and talk to us in eServices if you would like a hand doing this.

But, if you don’t mind playing yourself, these abbreviated notes might help.

• In PreciseMail go to your “Allow” list and export to a CSV list
• Open that in a text editor (e.g. Notepad), remove any ‘*’ wildcards and notes , then save as a text file – Outlook won’t import a CSV file.
• In Outlook’s Junk Mail options, import the file via the ‘Safe Senders’ tab.

If you have blacklists, the same process should work.

We don’t know when PreciseMail will be turned off.

Peter

I can only assume this is a Health and Safety message – and I thought I was just updating out-of-office hours!

In future, when accessing databases and other subscription resources on campus, you will be asked to login more than previously – essentially once per browser session.  This is for the wired network – those using wireless networks have to log in now.

There are several reasons for this – some technical, some policy-based.

From the technical side, we have long had two problems. The first is that if there is abuse of a resource from on-campus, we don’t know who is responsible and typically all access is blocked. Having a log-in makes it easy to identify who is responsible. The second is with Ebook Central ebooks – our users often end up with a generic connection, rather than their own bookshelf, which causes problems e.g. unable to print pages because somebody else has already used the quota.

The policy side relates to student well being and the work being done to identify student engagement. Logging in on-campus captures the fact that a student is engaging – previously this would only be seen for off-campus resources.

In addition there will be some changes next year which make this change sensible – one is that OCLC is releasing a new version of Ezproxy with far more security built in, and requiring logins will work better with this version.

Happy to go into more detail in person – Peter

(sadly don’t need to put Peter K any more, now that Peter H has retired!)

Tonight, Friday, ITS are releasing another set of security patches. In addition, they are also releasing another operating system upgrade for many of us, which may take some time to put in place.

You can reduce the chance of delay on Monday by starting this process before going home today. Go to the ‘Software Center’ and on the left hand side, click on Upgrades. On the right-hand side click the button ‘Install All’.

You can then log your machine off.