The Library's infrastructure system, or ILS (integrated library system) will experience some downtime this coming Thursday, March 17th.
How does this affect our users? In several ways. For one thing, our Online Catalog (or OPAC) will be down. This will prevent you from looking up specific books and ebooks, and from accessing your personal circulation record to do things like renew books.
But here's the key issue: Our Proxy Server, the means of authenticating as a Suffolk user before being relayed into research databases, will also be down. THIS MEANS THAT OFF-CAMPUS ACCESS TO OUR LIBRARY DATABASES WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE DURING THIS SYSTEM WORK.
The library will be closed for Evacuation Day, which is also St. Patrick's Day, and in the middle of our Spring Break Week. We chose this day, specifically, as the one weekday that would be convenient for Innovative, our ILS company, but which would also create the least amount of disruption for our users.
If you happen to be ON campus, say, in a faculty office, you may still be able to access databases, by hitting them directly (and being authenticated through IP recognition, rather than Proxy Server authentication). To do this, our electronics librarian, Amy, has created a handy guide that lists database links without the proxy parts of the URLs.
This guide is http://suffolk.libguides.com/noproxy
But remember, this will only work from an ON-campus location where your IP can be detected (and recognized as being that of a Suffolk subscriber) by the database's server.
Here are the details on the downtime:
Date: Thursday, March 17, 2011
Time: At about 12:30 PM, EST--for approximately TWO HOURS
Please plan your research accordingly. And our apologies for any inconvenience!
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