MetaLib and SFX will be unavailable for periods during the morning of Monday 15 December, and should be considered “at risk” throughout that day. This is due to an important service upgrade.

During the outage periods, a list of database links will be available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/database.

Unfortunately, links to UCL’s e-journal subscriptions will be unavailable at times.  This includes links from the lists within MetaLib, from the eUCLid library catalogue and from SFX buttons in other databases.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Users may be experiencing problems with linking from the ejournals list and databases to some Wiley-Blackwell journals.  This is a result of publisher changes.  The problem is affecting titles formerly published by Blackwell, and for which the SFX full-text option is “Full text available from Synergy…” 

When you enter year, volume, issue and page information in the SFX box, or when this information is entered automatically if you are linking to an article from a database or reading list, sometimes you might be directed to an “entity not found” message after you click “go” in the SFX box.  The error looks like this:

Library Services is working to implement technical changes that will address this problem.  In the meantime, a temporary solution is to remove all year, volume, issue and page information from the SFX box.  When you then click “go” in the SFX box, you will be taken to the journal home page, from where you will be able to navigate to the volume and issue you need.

If you would like to ask a question about ejournals at UCL, you can either post a comment on this blog, or e-mail ejournals@ucl.ac.uk. 

If your query is to do with problems accessing ejournals (whether it relates to a particular journal or not), please provide the following information:

• A brief description of the nature of the fault
• The location of your PC (on- or off-campus)
• The IP address of the PC (you can find this information at http://whatsmyip.org/, but you need not include it if you post a comment to the blog)
• The URL, journal name and title of the article you are having problems accessing
• The error message, including the URL in the browser address bar when the message appears 

Some users are experiencing problems related to local firewall settings when accessing the new ejournals list off-site.  The errors vary depending on the specific firewall and browser, but can generally be characterised as “access denied” messages. 

The solution is to make sure that the addresses metalib-a.lib.ucl.ac.uk:9003 and metalib-a.lib.ucl.ac.uk:8331 are explicitly permitted for traffic through your (or your organisation’s) firewall.  If the problem is to do with your firewall at home, you’ll need to consult the documentation for whichever package you use (F-Secure, Norton, ZoneAlarm etc.)  The section will probably be called “Firewall”.  There should be something like a set of “Rules” or a “Trusted Zone” that allows you to specify sites and port numbers that should be allowed through the firewall.

UCL now has a new ejournals service. This comprises an A-Z list with SFX links to full text, much improved search functionality, subject lists, links to major ejournal collections and lists of journals by publisher. Please note that if you want to browse the contents of a journal, do not enter any year, volume, issue or page information in the SFX box: simply click “go” next to the full-text link and you will be taken to the journal home page.

Users who like browsing for a title can click to go to a particular start letter and its subsets. Alternatively, select the “starts with” radio button and enter the first word(s) of the title (Nature, for example) to narrow your browsing.

You can add journals to your list of favourites, using the plus button next to titles: this makes it easy to find journals that you use frequently.