In response to a question from some Nursing faculty, I recently learned that we have a pretty tight cap on the number of concurrent users allowed in Journals@Ovid titles. Here's the word from Katherine:
"For any title through Journals@Ovid, the limit is one user per title -- three users per Journals@Ovid. That is, there can be three users in Journals@Ovid, but they all can't be looking at the same title. The title/article/session times out after 15 minutes or as soon as the article/title is released by the user."
So, if users are getting a "licenses exceeded" message trying to get into Ovid full text, this is probably why. This came up in the context of FindIt links for course reserves, where an entire class may be trying to get to the same article. We should also encourage students to click the logoff button after they're done looking at the article so that it's available for other students more quickly.
Just a FYI. I didn't know about this - maybe I'm the only one. :)
Thanks!
Liz
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
The Task Force on Research Infrastructure recently released its preliminary report (http://www1.umn.edu/systemwide/strategic_positioning/tf_prelim_reports_0603/res_infra_prelim.pdf). Wendy Lougee is a member of this task force, and I think it is worth noting that the Libraries' collections are mentioned several times in this report as a priority service and resource for the University.
I also wanted to alert you that the task force made use in the report of Institutional-level citation metrics from the Thomson-ISI Essential Science Indicators (ESI) product, which the Libraries recently licensed. Especially since this is a fairly new library resource, you may receive questions about ESI from faculty or others who read the report.
The task force needed a method to assess the relative strength of research in various subject areas at the University. The method using ESI to achieve this is described in some detail in the Task Force report (Appendix A, p 21-3), and so I refer you to that document for details. For sake of clarity, though, I'll mention that the percentage rankings shown in the Task Force report were calculated including only ranked universities, not other types of institutions such as corporations and government agencies which show in ESI rankings. That is, we (Marc Jenkins, the task force co-Chair, and I) hand-selected the universities from the institutional rankings shown in ESI, and retabulated the rankings for this subset of institutions. Hence, reproducing these rankings would not be a straightforward task for someone trying to answer a question at a reference desk.
Any attempt at ranking subject areas or departments is inherently controversial, and while we've taken considerable effort to handle the ESI data in a fair manner, some questions/concern about this can be expected from interested faculty members. If a faculty member approaches you concerning the use of the ESI data in the Task Force report, please feel free to refer them to Wendy or myself (messn006@umn.edu).