IS have now fixed the user authentication problems that were affecting services campus wide. So all services that use Shibboleth or ADS authentication, such as NOW, ‘My Library Card’ in Web OPAC, eSearch and RefWorks, are working again.

However, if you do discover any further problems, then please let eServices know.

We are experiencing major problems with University username and password authentication. This is affecting access to all services that use Shibboleth or ADS authentication, such as NOW, ‘My Library Card’ in Web OPAC, eSearch and RefWorks. IS are currently investigating the problem.

In the meantime, these services are unavailable.

A further update will follow once there is more news to report from IS.

Off-campus access to the ejournal content in the ICE Virtual Library Archive has now been restored following a recent interruption in service. Access on-campus remains direct; with off-campus access by university username and password. It has proved possible to re-establish off-campus access to this content following a series of upgrades on the ICE platform. Because the ICE Virtual Library is not yet Shibboleth compliant, off-campus access is made available via eZprozy. ICE expect to be able to support Shibboleth based authentication in the near future, when LLR will migrate to full Shibboleth authentication for the service.

The ejournal content provided through the ICE Virtual Library Archive is as follows:

* Transactions of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1836-1842)
* Life of Telford (1838)
* Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1837-1935)
* ICE Engineering Division Papers (1942-1951)
* Journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers (1935-1951)
* Proceedings of the ICE Parts 1 and 2 (1952-1991)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Civil Engineering (1992-2001)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Municipal Engineer (1992-2001)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Structures & Buildings (1992-2001)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Transport (1992-2001)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Water Maritime & Energy (1992-1999)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Geotechnical Engineering (1994-2001)
* Proceedings of the ICE – Water and Maritime Engineering (2000-2001)

In addition to this archival access, LLR has current subscriptions to a number of ICE journal titles. An audit of LLR’s electronic holdings entitlements for these titles is currently underway.

RefWorks experienced a further brief loss of service on 5 November (following the earlier reported outage on 3 November). eServices has been in contact with RefWorks support in Germany and the US, and provided debugging information about NTU’s loss of connectivity. If you experience any future loss of access to the service during the remainder of 2009, please contact Lib eServices with details of the date and time when connection to the service was unavailable.

When a service issue is affecting access to a resource in eSearch, details of the problem are added to the information held in the Information icon pop-up. However, this service information is not immediately visible in the initial Database List display, and we are aware that customers sometimes miss important service information because of this. In an attempt to improve the visibility of this important information, eServices is testing the display of a ’service issue’ icon in the eSearch display (see illustration below). These icons will be added to databases in eSearch when a known service issue occurs, and removed when the issue is resolved.

When a customer floats their cursor over the icon the following text displays: “There is an issue affecting this resource, check the Information icon for more details” (see illustration below). If the test proves successful, the icon and text will be added to the eSearch ‘Key to resource icons’. Please share any feedback you have on the usefulness (or otherwise) of this eSearch feature.

RefWorks has confirmed that access to the service has been fully restored following yesterday afternoon’s outage. RefWorks “apologize for the inconvenience and want you to know that we are taking steps to make sure that this does not happen again.”

If you continue to experience any problems accessing RefWorks, please contact the eServices team with full details of the issue.

The RefWorks service is currently unavailable due to technical problems affecting the RefWorks servers. It is not possible to access the service from either on-campus or off-campus.

eServices is in contact with RefWorks support team and a further update will follow once access has been restored.

Performance problems affecting the university’s web gateway during the afternoon of 23 October 2009 (reported by IS as now resolved) did affect on-campus access to LLR electronic resources.

Problems were first identified with remote and metasearching in eSearch (when searches were either timing out unresolved or producing an error), but other issues were soon apparent as external web connections more generally were affected. Access to electronic resources within the university network (such at the Library Catalogue, IRep and and LLR web site) were not affected by the problem.

If you continue to experience any technical problems with connecting to external web services, please contact the eServices team with details of the issue.