Justis

To reiterate what's been said elsewhere, Justis is no longer available off-campus It's not gone forever, promise. More news in 2-4 weeks or thereabouts. On-campus, Justis is still available from here. We do apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

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.

Justis

Another day, another database. Justis is available on-campus only at the moment. Please bear with us as we arrange off-campus access. We'll let know when that happens

WARC Access

In the lead up to the new academic year, we are very busy. You will have seen the new website and the new search interface. One small issue is WARC access. We are in the process of making alternative arrangements for on and off-campus access. WARC is now available on-campus from this link. Please bear with us while we find a home for off-campus access.

A brief guide to resource access at DBS part 1

This post is long and dull, but will give some insight into how and why you access electronic resources at DBS the way that you do.
The A to Z journal list, incredibly enough, is an A to Z listing of all the journals, magazines and reports accessible through the library. Some, a very small number are subscribed to directly by the library and hard copies are available to browse or photocopy in Aungier St or Portobello. The A to Z entry for such a journal will say something along the lines of "Print copies available in Aungier St". The vast majority of journals however are only available electronically. Again, the vast majority of journals available electronically are via electronic resources to which the library subscribes. Because we pay money for them, we have a licence to use them. One of the conditions of the licence is that we grant access only to current students and staff. At DBS there are two ways of doing this:

• IP authentication: every computer linked to the Internet has an IP address - which allows the computer to communicate with the Internet. The library registers with the electronic resource provider a list of IP addresses which are allowed to access a particular resource. The only IP addresses that we know are the colleges own, so IP authentication is used to grant access to resources on campus
• Referring URL: when you click on a link to visit a web page, there's a lot going on behind the scenes; as well as the IP address of the computer, the URL of the page from which the link was clicked is also sent. This can be used to record information about visitors, but it can also be used to restrict access to websites. Access to DBS resources off-campus is by referring URL. The URL in question is the link embedded in the 'Search All Resources' image on the library home page. This page cannot be accessed off-campus without having first logged in with your username and password, hence it's reasonably secure. A small minority of users may have problems with I'll detail in part 2.

Consequently, when you access the A to Z journal list off-campus and click on a link to a specific journal, access will be denied because the referring URL, the A to Z journal list URL, is not recognised as one which grants access to those resources. If you're on-campus, your IP address is registered and so you get access.
I know what you're thinking right now: "Why don't you make the A to Z journal list a referring URL?" We couldn't do that unless we restricted access to the A to Z journal list. "So why don't you do that?" We don't so this because we firmly believe that the library, and library resources are marketing tools; we want potential students to see what we have available in the library, because we think that we have a very good selection of resources (your opinion of course, may differ) Making the list of electronic resources and the A to Z journal list publically available facilitates this.
Hence on-campus, you can use the A to Z to gain direct access to journals, off-campus you can use it to identify electronic resources where you can access the journal via 'Search All Resources'

Database Issues

A couple of issues have arisen with access to databases:

Lexis-Nexis: We would greatly prefer you to access Lexis-Nexis through WebFeat rather than asking for the user name and password. To access Lexis-Nexis through Webfeat, enter your search term and scroll through the list of databases, tick the box next to the Lexis-Nexis database (Butterworths or News and Business) and search. Viewing any of results will take you in to the Lexis-Nexis database itself. From there,you can search within Lexis-Nexis as if you had logged into with a username and password.

Mintel: Due to, we suspect some background technical changes made, Mintel no longer works with Internet Explorer on campus. It does work with Firefox and so we will be restoring Firefox to all student PCs in the next week or so.

Search all resources: This opens in a separate window and may be minimised, so be careful! If nothing appears to be happening, check the tabs at the bottom of the screen

Britannica Online Academic Edition

A trial of Britannica Online Academic Edition is now available on campus at DBS Library. Britannica Online allows users to search or browse for information in encyclopedias, magazines, videos, and web sites. Access is available until November 7th 2007.

A guided tour of the online encyclopedia is available here in PDF format.