Dawsonera down

The Dawsonera website is currently unavailable.  This is due to unforseen technical issues (are technical issues ever forseen I wonder?)  Unfortunately Dawsonera are unable to provide a time scale for when the service will resume, so I'm guessing it's rather serious.  But be assured they are working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

**Update 20/06/2014**

Dawsonera anticipate that their full service will continue to be unavailable throughout the weekend.

Accessing ebooks on Dawsonera

We use Dawsonera as our ebook platform.  We like Dawsonera.  We like Dawsonera so much that we have over 1500 titles available as ebooks on this platform.

Recently, Dawsonera did sometime that has caused us a little inconvenience; they changed their password criteria.  Previously, we were able to set up students with their student number and date of birth as username and password.  After changing password requirements, this is no longer possible, as all Dawsonera passwords now need upper & lower case (capital and small) letters and numbers.  The process of setting up students with library. EBSCO, and Dawsonera is semi-automated.  The "semi-" part means that it is not feasible to create passwords for Dawsonera, so we don't do that anymore.  If you don't have a Dawsonera login, you can skip the next paragraph.

In addition to changing the password criteria, Dawsonera seem to be invalidating existing passwords.  I say "seem" because it doesn't appear to be happening to everyone, yet  If your password still works, then hurrah!  However, that may change in the near future.

I welcome back readers who skipped the last paragraph and ask, then answer the question "how do I access ebooks on Dawsonera?"  Simple, through an Athens account.  Athens is an access management system used to manage access to electronic resources. If you have an Athens login, you can access all of the library's resources off-campus, including Dawsonera, with one login.

To access Dawsonera through Athens, either

1)            Login to MyAthens
               Click on the Resources Tab
               Click on Dawsonera
               You will be logged into Dawsonera automatically
Or

2)            Go to the Dawsonera website
               Go to the Athens/Shibboleth login
               Login with your Athens details

The next question then is "how do I get an Athens account?".  Contact the library - email is best for this purpose, and include your student number.  You should receive two emails, one will basically be an acknowledgement of your request sent by the library, the second will be sent by Athens and contain your account details.  If you don't receive the acknowledgement and/or the account details email, do contact the library again - and don't leave it too long before doing so. 

        

Dawsonera

Don't say we didn't warn you... Dawsonera

is pleased to announce the imminent arrival of the new dawsonera Reader Portal. Offering an enhanced user experience through a completely redesigned interface, with enhanced search results, refinement and save search functions, dawsonera now takes content discoverability to a new level. For the first time dawsonera will offer a choice in procurement models, opening the platform up to previously restricted content and more core textbooks. Social sharing through integrated Facebook and Twitter feeds will connect study groups and promote title discovery, and with “my bookshelf”, “recently viewed” and “my notes” options, ebook based research has never been easier.

Coming soon. More information as it becomes known

Dawsonera and Apple devices

A Happy New Year to all our readers. You young people are starting to use tablet devices more frequently, and some of you have always used Apples. If you use an iPad or a Mac and want to download ebooks from Dawsonera, please bear in mind the following: Macs and iPads come with a free PDF reader which unfortunately can't handle the peculiar type of pdfs used by Dawsonera. To read Dawsonera PDFs on your iPad, download this from iTunes To read them on your Mac, make sure that you have Adobe Reader as your default PDF reader. There should be no problem reading them online however

Dawsonera e-book - outage on Sat. 8th Dec. 2012

On Saturday 8th December 2012, our e-book provider Dawsonera will be performing an essential upgrade on their web service and this will result in an outage between 10am and 6pm that day.

Dawsonera again

On-campus, students don't need to login to Dawsonera to see e-books.  You do however have to login to print, download or save to favourites.  Don't get confused with login details! Below is the login screen:

To login with an Athens account, click the link next to Athens users.  To login with a Shibboleth account, click the link next to Shibboleth users (there are no DBS Shibboleth accounts).  To login directly, students should enter their student number as their username and their date of birth in format dd/mm/yyyy (DO. NOT FORGET. THE. SLASHES) as their password.  Students should not enter their Athens accounts details here, as they won't work.  I will confuse you some more, another time  

Dawsonera

Posts have been pretty thin on the ground recently as we are all very busy. Anyway, we have made changes to Dawsonera logins from last year and want to avoid confusion (no chance!)
If you registered before January 2009 and have never logged in to Dawsonera, please contact the library
If you registered after January 2009 and before July 2009, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format dd/mm/yyyy
Dawsonera then altered the way that we created usernames and passwords so that their software recognised the first slash in dd/mm/yyyy as some kind of end of line or end of field symbol, so instead of seeing dd/mm/yyyy as the password, Dawsonera sees dd as the password. Two character passwords are not allowed by Dawsonera. Hence if you registered between July 2009 and August 2010, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in format ddmmyyyy
Dawsonera then came up with a fix that allowed us to go back to using dd/mm/yyyy as the password, so if you registered after August 2010, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format dd/mm/yyyy.
Obviously we're not thrilled about changing passwords like this, but dd/mm/yyyy is easier to create and it matches up with logging into databases. Thank you for your considerable patience.

Dawsonera

Dawsonera, for the benefit of our three new readers (hello!) is our electronic book platform. You can read a book online, or download it to be read. Anyway until now, in order to access Dawsonera you had to login. On-campus or off-campus, made no difference; you had to login. That has changed slightly. On-campus, you no longer need to login if you want to read an ebook in the DBS collection, just click this link. If you want to avail yourself of personalised features on campus, such as print, copy, notes, add to favourites etc., you will need to login and will be prompted to do so. If you want to access Dawsonera off-campus, you will need to login at this link.

Another enhancement to Dawsonera is that you can now save citations into your Zotero library. Zotero is a citation management add-on to the Firefox browser and is strongly recommended by library. Select 'Export to Endnote' and if you have Zotero installed, the citation will be saved automatically.

Important - Ebook passwords

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Song of Myself - Walt Whitman

Having written a brief guide to username and passwords yesterday, I'm now forced to contradict what I said about Dawsonera - Ebook logins. First, let me explain. Rather than wait for you all to contact the library asking for Dawsonera username and passwords, we are able to bulk create new users. This means we can create hundreds of accounts at the same time rather than one at a time. This is really handy for us, and for you as well as you don't have to bother contacting the library to ask for a login. Sadly Dawsonera recently "enhanced" their bulk user creation software. One of the "enhancements" turned out to be their software now recognising the first slash in dd/mm/yyyy as some kind of end of line or end of field symbol, so instead of seeing dd/mm/yyyy as the password, Dawsonera sees dd as the password. Two character passwords are not allowed by Dawsonera. Epic fail.

So, if you are a new student, having registered since July, and have not previously logged into Dawsonera, or have contacted the library to be set up with a username and password, then your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format ddmmyyy - no slashes involved (except for the one I want to make to the flesh of Dawsonera programmers).

Summarising Dawsonera logins:
If you were here before January 2009 your username is probably firstnamesurname or firstinitialsurename e.g. clarkkent or ckent and your password is your student number.
If you registered after January 2009 and before July 2009, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format dd/mm/yyyy
If you have registered in July 2009 or after, your username is your student number and your password is your date of birth in the format ddmmyyyy. If this doesn't work try using your student number as your password. If you are unable to login, please contact me.

I apologise for having to make this more complicated that it really should be, but I suppose I have to thank Dawsonera for making this post possible. Thanks Dawsonera! (To be said in the same tone as said here)