I had a call for the Internal Medicine Chief residents yesterday regarding their inability to use the FindIt tool from Ovid MEDLINE and PubMed. I made a house call (PWB-14-109) to try to help resolve the problem, which is an "Error on Page" message in the bottom left-hand corner of the browser (IE) window, and the FindIt page not loading. I wasn't and they only had IE on their machines, but I was able to get to the articles the chiefs wanted by going from the e-journals page and using FindIt, indicating that this isn't a FindIt issue.
Later in the day I had a patron come to the desk to ask about two journals and mentioned before leaving the desk that FindIt wasn't working for her. She was from Pediatric Endocrinology, which is on the 13th floor of PWB.
I spoke with Janet Arth about the problem and the information that I had, and she surmised that this might be an issue related to the Windows Update that was pushed out Wednesday afternoon - the fact that three computers in different places had the same problem is suspicious. The Update could affect the IE default settings or defaults in the XP Firewall, which might block how FindIt works within our Ovid databases and PubMed.
If you receive a call about this or a question at the desk have the requestor see if FindIt works in a more general source like Academic Search Premier, which might mean that the problem is related to our configuration of X.500 authentication for Ovid and PubMed. You might also ask if they have Firefox or safari and have them try these browsers, which would support Janet's suggestion.
I'll let you all know if there is a better solution, when one is found,
Jim