Tuesday, July 19, 2011

New access to databases

I've added the new links to the site for the databases that now work on-campus, and made a blog news post about it.
Do let me know of any problems you encounter.

For ARTSTOR and NetLibrary, I've eliminated all mention of needing to create accounts. That was confusing for patrons before, and NetLibrary's integration inot EBSCOhost is likely going to destroy all those accounts anyway.

As for LearningExpress Library, I believe it still needs an account made on campus because that's a LOUIS resource, and those haven't been changed (yet).

Friday, July 15, 2011

EZ Proxy: better than ever

The problems with SciFinder's EZ Proxy connection has apparently been fixed! but that's not all that it did!

Here is a video showing a successful off campus log-in to SciFinder, 23 MB:
http://www.ulm.edu/reference/scifinder-SUCCESS!.zip
My first try in SciFinder gave me an error message, but I tried it again and then it worked. I did not need to change the URL on the web page to get in.

I'm very, very pleased with the results, for the change has not only fixed access to SciFinder, but has fixed access for several other databases we were having problems with for a long time, even before the Computing Center became directly involved in library operations (2009?). Classical Music Library, for instance, stopped working off-campus after they upgraded their interface. With the addition of SSL, they work now.

ACM
ARTSTOR (only works off-campus with on-campus account creation at this time, but worked in the proxy w/o an account. You can still use accounts to access personal customizations)
BioOne
Classical Music Library
NetLibrary (only works off-campus with on-campus account creation at this time, but worked in the proxy w/o an account. You can still use accounts to access personal customizations)

I also did run-down of all the databases we have to see if the SSL change affected them. It seems to be OK, but access to Datamonitor 360 is a little goofy. It at first didn't work, but then I tried something else and it did work. Maybe it was a "hiccup" but I'll look at it again today. RIA Tax Services is meant to be a on-campus creation only for off-campus sort of database. I left it alone for now, but I'll look into it again later.

And he is a complete set of all the videos I recorded while looking at various aspects of the databases. It's 486 MB (!). The videos are long because in most of them I tried to do a quick search and actually view a document-- sometimes it looks like you're logged in, but you're really not and you run into a paywall when you try to see full text. The file names inside indicate what they are about.
http://www.ulm.edu/reference/july14-2011-dbtests.zip

It's not exiting to watch and I made it so that I don't have to rely on memory, so here's a list of the important things learned:
· Changing the URL links themselves from "http" to "httpS" causes them to not work at all. So we won't need to change them to "https"
· I now have working URLs for the newly enabled databases
· Some databases listed in the https://ezproxy.ulm.edu pages don't actually allow access to documents (???)

Next steps:
  • Putting up new off-campus links for the resources that work off-campus (I'll do that later today)
  • consolidating EZ Proxy so that all the DBs work on one connection, and getting a customized log-in page with log-in instructions...
  • figuring out what other resources should be working off-campus and fixing them to do that

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

LOUIS, AccessScience, EZ Proxy

a)
Today I added the AccessScience Database trial to the home page news and blog

b)
I've update the ULM library LOUIS page to show Sara Zimmerman's statement about it:
http://www.ulm.edu/library/louis/

c)
Since it's been a while and some good things have happened, I've asked LOUIS if it's OK to remove the database "intercept" pages. The answer was yes, so I'm now going to take them all down. I doubt that anyone bookmarked them, but in case they did and they ask you "why won't this link work?"just tell them we didn't need the intercept anymore.

The LOUIS logo has been added to the database pages so that LOUIS' branding is where it deserves to be.

d)
We're getting closer to solving the EZ Proxy problem with SciFinder (I hope). The connection needed to be a secure SSL connection, and we need a "certificate" to do that. Getting on should allow the connection to work.

However, the old "michael1" server it used to work on wasn't secure either. We don't know why it ever worked, although I believe that it did.

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Hours + LOUIS logo

This weekend I changed the hours to show the 4th of July closing, and now I'm changing it back to normal.

With DS's approval, I've also asked RG and Uni. Relations if it's all right to add the LOUIS logo to the website's DB pages. It's one of those demo pages I showed the ULMLWPC some time ago:
http://ulm.edu/~niemla/louis-test/dbname.html

The SciFinder EZ Proxy problems still haven't been resolved, and I don't know when they will be.