Statistics Canada outage this Saturday

The entire Statistics Canada website (including E-STAT) will be off-line on Saturday, December 2, 2006 between 5 a.m. and approximately 8 p.m., Eastern time. Statistics Canada apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause.

Note that CANSIM will still be available via the eresources database link

<http://www.library.yorku.ca/eresolver/?id=328>

as well as other data tables via our agreement with University of Toronto:

<http://www.chass.utoronto.ca.ezproxy.library.yorku.ca/datalib/>

Message from LCS re: this morning’s outage

This morning there was a hardware failure on the primary Sirsi application server which caused an automatic reboot. As a result we experienced a WebCat outage of approximately 30 minutes.

Tomorrow morning (Friday, November 24) between 6:00 am and 7:00 am LCS staff and IBM technicians will replace the component that failed. During that time ALL Sirsi activities will be unavailable. Note that this does not include CMS or eResources.

When problems occur LCS staff try to update the System Status page to inform everyone. However, depending upon the nature of the problem there may be a delay. Please check the status page before calling LCS.

OPAC is back up

OPAC is unavailable

LCS is working on the problem; more news as it develops.

OUTAGE: Royal Society of Chemistry website/journals

The Royal Society of Chemistry has advised that their web site <http://www.rsc.org/> (and, presumably, all their electronic journals) will not be available on Saturday, December 2, 2006 from 09:00 to 17:00 GMT for essential maintenance.

New database trial: UN Comtrade

http://unstats.un.org/unsd/comtrade/

Requires use of Internet Explorer. Access restricted to yorku.ca domain; trial ends 2006.12.09

From the vendor:

UN COMTRADE is the pseudonym for United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database. Over 140 reporter countries provide the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) with their annual international trade statistics data detailed by commodities and partner countries. The UN COMTRADE is the largest depository of international trade data. It contains well over 1.1 billion data records. Time series of data for reporter countries starts as far back as 1962 and goes up to the most recent completed year.

• For further information …

Please note that UN Comtrade data are provided for our internal use only and may not be re-disseminated in any form without the written permission of the United Nations Statistics Division.

Some new features in Web of Science

As of now, apparently:

• Citation Report — Use this new, powerful citation analysis feature to reveal and display citation trends in just a few clicks
• Distinct Author Identification System — Find the right author, quickly
• Full Author Names — Full author names are shown as they are listed in original articles, to help eliminate mistaken identity

New database trials

Two new trials have been added to the trials page:

• The Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature
• Play Index on WilsonWeb

Go to the Trials page for more details.

More on the CSA database name changes

A subscriber to the scholarsportal list sent off a note to his CSA account rep about this; here are the responses:

I appreciate the frustration encountered when changes are made without
warning, and without context.

I have forwarded your note to the Product Manager (and am copying her on this reply), and she may contribute additional thinking … but the preliminary impetus for the change was the upcoming launch of the new Full-Text collections in Sociology and Political Science in partnership with Proquest.

We had started this naming convention with the Technology Research Database a couple of years ago, and many databases had CSA affixed in front of the database name. CSA’s catalogue, product listing and marketing literature already refer to these databases with CSA leading the database name, and this change was intended to provide uniformity on the platform itself.

The Scholar’s Portal implementation is a unique situation, worldwide, and perhaps we did not adequately consult OCUL members prior to the change. Hopefully we’ll see this as a learning opportunity, to ensure that communications flow more smoothly in advance of any future changes.

As a reminder, in the A to Z list, on your website, you can create multiple links directly to a single database, combination of databases, or subject group, through the use of login links. As a humble suggestion, you might consider maintaining a link to the old format name, which would help students locate the database without needing to be aware
of the name change.

If you agree that this might provide a reasonable solution, I’d be happy to walk you through the process, or to have someone from our support department work on it with you.

Otherwise, I’ll refer to [the product manager] for additional comments.

Said product manager responded with:

CSA has been part of the official name of CSA Sociological Abstracts, CSA
Social Services Abstracts, and CSA Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts since 1998, and CSA Worldwide Political Science Abstracts since it was created in 2000.

These are the names that are used on the corresponding print products, marketing materials, legal documents, etc. Somehow, and embarrassingly enough, the names were not standardized on our platform. This inconsistency became clear, as Stephen states, as we prepare to release an upgraded version of the databases in collaboration with ProQuest, and it simply had to be dealt with.

My apologies for not notifying OCUL of the change in advance and we’ll do our best to keep that in mind in future. We’re happy to have Stephen or one of our customer care team members assist with setting up links as described below, if you see that as a workable solution.

Thanks for your feedback and my apologies, again, for the inconvenience.

OUTAGE: Corbis Images for Education

There is a Corbis Images for Education outage scheduled for Saturday, November 4th, from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. PST. The Corbis Images for Education website (http://gale.corbis.com) will not be accessible during this time. Users will be directed to an outage notification page for the duration for the work.