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Scheduled OneSearch downtime on 04/26/2015
Ex Libris will be performing maintenance in our OneSearch production environment in the wee hours of Sunday, April 26, 2015. The server will be rebooted as part of this process so OneSearch may be unavailable between midnight and 4 AM that morning.
Recent troubles with centrally-managed EZproxy servers
If you have a centrally-hosted EZproxy instance, you may have noticed an uptick in the number of users reporting authentication problems. This is due to our exceeding our SIP* license limit thanks to the increased use of e-resources (most likely stemming from OneSearch). We are looking into requesting a new SIP2 license from Ex Libris.
Because self-checkout also relies on SIP2, libraries with automated checkout machines may notice more users reporting problems with their barcodes there, too.
While we wait for the new license from the vendor, users experiencing problems with their barcodes should wait a few minutes before trying to re-connect to the database or checkout a book using a self-checkout station.
* The SIP server is used to query the Aleph patron file with the barcode.
Adwords plugin available
The Adwords plugin allows a library to add a small tile to the results page right above the results to provide quick links to other pages according to a predefined list of hotwords and matching URLs.
For example, students may enter things like “late fees” into a search box to find information about fines and fees for overdue items. With this plugin, you can present your users with an extra result that may take them out of the OneSearch interface and directly to the page they’re hoping to find:
The functionality is currently available in the CUNY-wide OneSearch as well as Baruch’s OneSearch instance. To see the plugin in action, search for the name of a database (such as JSTOR).
If you’d like to incorporate this functionality into your OneSearch instance, please consult the OLS Support Site. You will need to fill out a spreadsheet and submit a work order to the CUNY Service Desk.
Course reserves now available in OneSearch
We recently published all records in the CUN30 library of Aleph for inclusion in Primo. In layman’s terms: course reserve items are now available in OneSearch!
If you’ve ever tried to use the Course Reserve module in the CUNY Catalog, you’ll notice that this is a huge improvement over the old interface. Not only that but users can search a single institution’s reserve collection! (You could not search just, say, the Baruch reserves in the past.) Students who search for a generic term, such as “calculus,” will only see records at their institution that are held on reserve. Furthermore, the facets on the left-hand side will let them whittle it down even further, giving them the option to limit their results to a particular course, instructor, department, or semester.
The reserves tab differs only slightly from the regular “OneSearch” tab:
- We have suppressed the “Request” button so users are not led to believe they can place holds or CLICS requests on items held on reserve.
- The “Off campus?” message is hidden since the records come only from the catalog and not from Primo Central or another restricted source.
Further customization options of the display of the reserves tab will be discussed at the upcoming Public Services Committee meeting on April 16th.
This is an opt-in feature so please open a work order with the CUNY Service Desk ([email protected]) to let OLS know that you want a new tab in your OneSearch view that will contain only your course reserve records.
How-To | User-triggered error reporting in EZproxy
In March 2013, while we were redesigning the EZproxy login pages for the proxy servers that we manage at OLS, I decided to spruce it up a little bit and make it so that users can send error reports if they reach needhost.htm:
