CONVENIENCE: “minimum fuss”
Baffled by why everything in your life is YouTube easy but just reading a PDF article is not?
An article in draft in UKSG news compares the genesis of tools like the Open Access button and UnPaywall in solving the “access problem” with Kopernio
The University of Cambridge now has access to the Berliner Philharmoniker Digital Concert Hall.
Access to the Concert Hall is via this URL:
https://www.digitalconcerthall.com
A pop-up window will appear which prompts you to register with your email address and password or to log in with an existing account. After registering / logging in, you can view all concerts, films and interviews in the Digital Concert Hall free of charge on all supported devices from the network of your institution or from home.
Each season, around 40 concerts are broadcasted live and they can also be viewed at a later date in the concert archive. The archive already contains hundreds of recordings with all the great artists of classical music. There are also fascinating documentaries and bonus films.
The University subscription is on the basis of 3 simultaneous users, so please logout (last option in the dropdown list under Settings) when you have finished your session so as not to prevent other users from logging in.
Das Bild zeigt den Innenraum der Hamburger Hauptkirche St. Michaelis (Michel), Author: Je-str
Interior of St. Michael’s Church, Hamburg, where Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s cantata Heilig Wq 217 – which forms the introduction to the concert of Brahms’ German Requiem in the Digital Concert Hall – was first performed. “This ʻHeiligʼ,” according to the composer, “is an attempt … to attract far greater attention and sensation through ordinary harmonic progressions than any anguished chromaticism is able to achieve. It is my swan song …, and should serve to ensure that after my death I am not too soon forgotten.”–Digital Concert Hall programme notes.
On 30 March 2018 the Index of medieval art will transition to a new site. The old URL
http://ezproxy.lib.cam.ac.uk:2048/login?url=http://ica.princeton.edu
will be replaced by the new URL:
http://ezproxy.lib.cam.ac.uk:2048/login?url=https://theindex.princeton.edu
The new platform promises to be much more user friendly and will include new features such as filtered searching, a date slider, and (mirabile dictu) immediately visible thumbnail images.
Read more about this change here:
https://ima.princeton.edu/2018/02/23/database-switchover-news-and-help-for-researchers/
Triple-faced Janus, detail of stained glass window of the Labors of the Months, Chartres Cathedral, ca. 1220.
Developments over December 2017 and January 2018 may improve prospects for significant benefits to the user’s search experience in iDiscover.
Expanded your results beyond your collection in iDiscover, but hit the paywall as a result? For some time now, you could hit your Open Access button bookmarklet and get delivery of an OA repository version. Rather than extend search from outside with a tool, a new agreement should maximise search to discovery to delivery, dramatically decreasing the pain of that journey for users. Over 2018, we should see the integration of Primo (iDiscover) with CORE, making available in the University’s discovery service many millions of records for OA research articles, following the new partnership of the CORE service with Ex Libris.
The agreement has been described on the JISC involve blog here:
The aggregated content includes metadata (currently 90m records) and open access research outputs hosted in CORE (currently 9m full text articles) from more than 3,600 repositories and over 10,000 journals in the UK and worldwide (currently 70 countries) and in 53 languages. The Open University’s activity with the OpenMinTeD project (providing connectors to publisher OA content from Elsevier, Springer, Frontiers and PLoS ) has also resulted in more OA content (1,831,977 full text items) in CORE.
Given that CORE, to our knowledge, is the largest aggregation of full text OA content, it makes sense that, as part of its strategy, content is surface in existing library search products. Therefore, the partnership between CORE and ProQuest to surface OA content from CORE within Ex Libris Primo and Ex Libris Summon is a positive first step towards this aim. CORE is also intending to integrate with other library search products to ensure a wider search experience across all library search products.
In terms of navigating the paywall, for too long the University’s user community has found the task of getting access to content just that – a task. And no way should it be. Though Ex Libris has provided multiple repositories as collections we have activated for searching in iDiscover, the integration with CORE (COnnecting REpositories) should be on another scale, outstripping current capabilities completely in terms of user expectations. Of course, searchers may still well prefer to search where they know all research is open, but innovations like Unpaywall and the Open Access button, as the Jisc R&D project demonstrated late last year (its findings coinciding with the Ex Libris-CORE agreement), are already engendering potential for big changes in library discovery and Inter-Library Loan services.
Cambridge University Library is participating in a free trial of Maisaku from 1 February to the beginning of March. This is an archive of Mainichi Shinbun from the Meiji period to today. If you are on campus, you can try it via the link below:
https://dbs.g-search.or.jp/WMAI/WMAI_ipcu_login.html
For now, you will need to use the Cambridge VPN to use Maisaku off campus. You can find instructions here: https://help.uis.cam.ac.uk/devices-networks-printing/remote-access/uis-vpn
An update will be posted on the blog if we are able to set access off campus via Raven more easily. We have discussed the problem with the vendor, and we expect that the trial may be extended a few more days into March for this reason.
Access to British Standards Online is now enabled for off campus users via this link.
Both the on and off campus links are available from the Cambridge LibGuides Databases A-Z here.
Records for standards in BSOL will soon be discoverable in iDiscover. Access via iDiscover will only be available for on campus users (as we cannot at the moment build the off campus link into the iDiscover records).
The University of Cambridge started providing access to British Standards Online from December 2017. Unfortunately it was not possible to provide both on and off campus access at the time of going live. BSOL could not be provided for off campus users via our EZproxy server and BSOL has not yet implemented Shibboleth. The British Standards Institute expect to implement Shibboleth by the end of the third quarter of 2018. Until they do, we can provide off campus via the above link, but regret we cannot provide both on and off campus access via iDiscover until we can enable EZproxy and Shibboleth with BSI.
If you have any question please write to ejournals@lib.cam.ac.uk. Thank you.
Electronic Collection Management 
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