Electronic Resources Blog

We’re expecting there will be an upgrade to Summon later on today and this may cause a disruption to the service.

The primary benefit we’ll see from the upgrade is improved article level linking to content from the following publishers:
- BMJ Publishing
- Cambridge University Press
- Ebrary
- Elsevier
- Emerald
- HighWire Press
- JSTOR
- Mintel Group
- Oxford University Press
- ProQuest
- Sage Publications
- Springer-Verlag
- Wiley-Blackwell

In particular, the upgrade should resolve the problems we’ve been experiencing with ProQuest Newsstand.

UPDATE: 16/Nov/2011, 10pm

There were a few post-upgrade glitches with access to articles on the ProQuest platform, but these have now been resolved.

The method for locating ebooks (which are books you can read online in your web browser) in Summon has just been tweaked to make it the same as you use for locating online journal articles…

Finding Books

To filter your search results so that they only contain books, tick the “Book / eBook” facet…

…your results will now include print books (which you can borrow from the library) and ebooks (which you can read online).

Print books have a link through to the library catalogue…

Electronic books have a yellow “online” badge on them…

If we have both print and electronic, you’ll see separate links to both…

Finding just ebooks

If you’re not bothered about prints books and you just want to see which books you can read online, tick the “Items with full text online” facet…

Finding just print books

If you’re not bothered about ebooks and you just want to see what print books we have in the library, tick the “Items in the Library” facet…

We’ve had a few complaints recently that Summon doesn’t allow you save PDF files. This isn’t actually anything to do with Summon, but seems to be a recent change Adobe has introduced in their Acrobat Reader software.

If you find that the “save” icon is greyed out in the Acrobat toolbar…

…select “File”, “Save As” and “PDF”…

Alternatively, if the PDF has opened within a web browser window, hover your mouse near the foot of the PDF window to display a toolbar and then select the “save a copy” icon…

According to Adobe Support, the “save” icon only becomes active once a user has made changes to the PDF document. However, as the vast majority of full-text journal articles don’t allow you to alter the PDF, the icon remains inactive.

We’re experiencing a couple of glitches with books and ebooks on Summon at the moment. Serials Solutions is aware of the problems and is working to resolve them.

Firstly, selecting the “eBook” content type returns both ebooks and some print books. A temporary fix is to also select the “Items with full text online” option.

Secondly, sorting books by “Date (newest)” or “Date (oldest)” isn’t working correctly.

The Web of Science citation details in Summon are currently not returning any article details:

The problem has been reported to Serials Solutions and will hopefully be fixed soon.

Wildcard searching (see here for more info) is currently unavailable in Summon. Serials Solutions are aware and are working on resolving the problem.

Serials Solutions, who host our Link Resolver (360 Link) will be carry on maintenance on their services in July. This may result in short periods of downtime on Friday 15th July 2011, between 6pm and 7pm. If you receive any error messages when clicking on articles in Summon during that hour, please wait a minute and then try again.

Please accept our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by this planned maintenance.

We’re pleased to announce that Mintel Reports are now available within Summon.

The reports should have the “Content Type” of “Report”, so you can easily refine your search to show just the Mintel items, e.g. company report

Internet Explorer 9 (for Windows 7) is now out of beta testing and available to download. If you decide to upgrade, please be aware that Summon currently isn’t fully compatible with IE9 yet. In particular, the following interface features don’t work:

- the “refine your search” facets don’t do anything when clicked on
- the sort drop-down doesn’t resort results
- the search term(s) don’t re-appear in the search
- the preview overlay window for each result doesn’t open
- the “Feedback” link doesn’t open the feedback form

A temporary workaround to resolve the above is to switch IE9 to “Compatibility View” mode by clicking on the icon (circled in red) in the address bar:

Serials Solutions, the company who develop Summon, are aware of the problem and we expect the issues to be resolved a.s.a.p.

Since launching Summon last year, we’ve had occasional reports of users being unable to log in to access e-resources. In many of the instances, we’ve been able to track the problem down the cookie settings in the web browser.

In order to log into Summon, you should ensure that your web browser accepts both 1st party and 3rd party cookies from the library.hud.ac.uk domain.

If your browser is rejecting cookies from library.hud.ac.uk, you will see the following message:

If you need help configuring the cookie settings in your browser, please get in touch and we’ll do our best to help you out: library.support@hud.ac.uk

We’ve started putting together some guides for the major web browsers:

- Firefox 3
- Google Chrome
- Internet Explorer 8
- Internet Explorer 9
- Safari

The cookie that we send to your browser is a unique session ID string that contains no personal information. Unless you’ve selected the “remember me” option, the cookie will be deleted when you close your web browser down.

If your browser is configured to block 3rd party cookies, you may also experience problems accessing full-text on publisher web sites.