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**Revised dates** Forthcoming Aleph outage, 11th – 13th April

By Nayna Patel, on 15 March 2016

Colleagues,

The Digital Libraries Team will be undertaking a large AUP headings project which unfortunately cannot be completed without an Aleph outage this has been scheduled for 11th-13th April.

The reason for this piece of work is as follows:

The names and subjects in UCL’s catalogue are kept consistent and unambiguous by using forms of names maintained by the Library of Congress and National Library of Medicine, e.g.:

  • All Shakespeare’s works are findable under “Shakespeare, William,1564-1616.”
  • Books about the honey bee or Apis mellifera can be found under “Honeybee.”

Most academic libraries in the UK and US – including RLUK and OCLC members- use the same standards of authority control. We receive data for new names and subjects from a supplier, but we need to upgrade this to cope when names and subject terminology change. This is important for Explore searching, sharing our records with partners, and re-using our data in the future.

In practice, this will mean that there will be no Aleph at all between 11th – 13th April including self-service workstations, issue desk clients however book loans and returns will be possible via offline circulation

 More details on using offline circulation are available on LibNet

 The ‘AUP’ project is complex, also involving our ISD, the Digital Libraries team and various other members of Public and Support Services staff. This has meant a lot of negotiation in terms of people’s time and availability.

We hope the confirmed dates don’t cause too much inconvenience either for colleagues or of course for our users. We’ll ensure that the outage is publicised widely between now and the start of the April transition window.

Here’s a summary of how the Aleph outage will affect our services:

  • Circulation services e.g. book loans and returns only possible via offline circulation
  • Self-service: not available
  • No items will be due between 11th – 13th April
  • Membership: No registration of new members or renewals of accounts for existing members will be possible
  • Explore: No My Account sign-in, no renewals or reservation requests, no live item availability information (locations will be available in the Details tab otherwise Copac has holdings and locations information as per the most recent record upload)
  • Primo Central: some resources that are included in Primo Central require authentication for searching off-site these will inaccessible
  • Interlibrary loans: not available
  • Room bookings: not available
  • Change PIN: not available
  • All non-Aleph aspects of the Explore service such as e-resource and Digital Collections record searching and retrieval should not be affected but should be considered at risk

We hope to restore a full service by Thursday 14th April. However, systems should be considered at risk for part of the day.

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