L&LR staff blog

My prediction was that our quarterly Athens usage would hit 90,000 for Oct-Nov-Dec 2008.

I wasn’t far off. Actual figure = 89,183.

• Overall usage is up by 32% on the same quarter last year.
• Three databases/services in particular have shown massive jumps: IHS Technical Indexes (presumably because we now have access to the Construction Information Service); LexisNexis Butterworths; and LinkSource (i.e. Find it @ Lincoln).
• Conversely, usage via Athens of a number of resources has fallen to zero; this because we’re now authenticating directly via the UK Access Management Federation.

The full table is on the L&LR staff Portal, at: https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C12/C14/eLibraryUsageStatistics/

• My next prediction: the usage for Jan-Feb-Mar ‘09 will be in the order of 78,000-79,000.

He’s looking very festive…

These are my specific objectives for the year ahead – this is where I’m going to take my priorities next.

• Complete, and document, the launch of Find it @ Lincoln
• Write a draft collection development policy to inform the shift from print to ‘e’
• Pilot digital-to-digital copying under the CLA extended licence
• Develop advocacy programme for Institutional Repository
• Investigate and make recommendations re: implementation of innovative discovery tools, e.g. OPAC wrapper
• Write a proposal for the full implementation of online reading lists across all Bb modules

EBSCO advise that the problem of the A-to-Z and Fi@L running very slowly should now be fixed.

If you continue to get very slow response from either of these 2 systems, as we were last week, could you please email me with date and time?

Many thanks,

Paul

Hi all,

On top of the Athens system crash we experienced today, we’re having a couple of (alright, a few) ongoing issues with Athens at the minute, those being:

1. A number of databases still aren’t allowing direct access via Athens because of an out-of-date system file which forms part of UoL’s AthensDA mechanism (those databases being FAME, Mintel Reports, and the as-yet-unpromoted-to-users-until-we-sort-this-out ChildData). The way around this for the time being is to get the user to log in to MyAthens, and navigate to the database the ‘long way round’. The Online Services Team are helping to fix this.
2. First-time users of Athens are being sent round the houses when they click on their first Athens-enabled link: first to our terms & conditions, then to an Athens page, then back to the e-Library (for some reason), then to Athens’ T&Cs, then to the resource (hopefully!). I need to explore this further with the O.S.T.
3. Direct links to Athens-enabled resources from Blackboard are doubly-cursed, because Blackboard doesn’t set the Athens organisation cookie (as the Portal does). This is fine as long as the user has already accessed an Athens resource via the Portal, but not if their first-ever Athens login is via Bb. This includes links set up via LibraryLink > Find it @ Lincoln.

I’m working on all of these and I’ll keep you informed.

Paul

A few people have asked me if it’s possible to create reliable, persistent links to journal articles on Blackboard, via the link resolver, but without having to use the LibraryLink OpenURL tool.

• Yes, it is (Word doc.)

When you add the resulting link to Blackboard, you must make sure that it’s set to open in a new window. This is for two reasons:

1. Copyright – it’s considered “bad form” (i.e. borderline infringement) to open a third-party site in frames (it can look as if you’re appropriating the content and claiming it as your own). Blackboard uses frames.
2. Not doing so breaks Athens authentication, as I’ve discovered to my cost (I had to re-do a load of links to e-books that were’nt authenticating properly because the authentication was taking place in a frame).

Paul

I’ve just completed version 1.2.1 of the LibraryLink help guide for staff, and put it online.

It now includes instructions on how to link to an e-journal article using Find it @ Lincoln (our new OpenURL link resolver, for anyone who’s missed it!).

Paul