Saturday 8th February 21.00-01.00: Owing to the need to allow planned maintenance to take place some OneSearch functionality may be unavailable during part or all of this period. It may not be possible to Sign In, place Hold Requests, or Renew items during this period. Access to electronic resources from off campus may also be affected, as will laptop loans. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Category: System availability
OneSearch – Essential Maintenance
On Tuesday 3 September the Library will be performing essential maintenance on OneSearch. The work will be carried out between 07:00am and 09:00am. It is not expected that the service will become unavailable during this period but you may experience slow responses from time to time.
ISS Failover Exercise
On Saturday 10th September ISS are planning a failover exercise on the central
virtual server infrastructure. Some University services will not be available
for periods during the day and should be considered at risk between 9am and 5pm.
The Library services affected are listed below.
The Library Web site
MetaLib/OneSearch/SFX
The Library Catalogue
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
MetaLib and Catalogue availability
It will not be possible to log in to MetaLib or the Catalogue during the period of 08:30 – 09:30 on Wednesday 9th February. This will not affect the ability to search MetaLib or the Catalogue for on campus users, but off campus users will not be able to search MetaLib during that period.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
SFX downtime
We are upgrading the software behind our SFX linking service, so there may be periods when linking to journal articles from MetaLib is unavailable on Monday 10th January-Tuesday 11th January. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause. It will still be possible to get access to the articles, only not via SFX. Please use our Ask a Librarian service if you have any difficulty in getting to the articles you need.
[Update: The SFX upgrade was successful. There are one or two outstanding issues with some resources returning error messages in the SFX window. We hope to have these resolved as soon as possible]
Emergency Network Maintenance
Owing to an electrical safety issue in the Main Communications Room in the Library, ISS need to isolate the networking to the Library at 12:30 today to allow the equipment to be made safe.
This outage is expected to last no longer than 30 minutes, unfortunately all network services in the Library, Ruskin Library and Pre-School centre will be affected while the work is carried out.
ISS apologise for any inconvenience.
[Update: 13:18 – network services are restored]
System downtime
On Saturday 11th September ISS are conducting tests to their networked systems (a ‘Failover proving exercise’) that will mean temporary unavailability of some Library services. Between 09:00 and 17:00 the following services may be unavailable at any time:
- The Catalogue
- MetaLib
- SFX
- The Library Web site
The Library Building will be open as normal, and counter services will be as normal from 10:00-13:00, but self-issue of books will not be available. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. More information can be found at http://www.lancs.ac.uk/iss/news/today/failover-exercise.htm.
MetaLib downtime
The MetaLib service may be intermittently unavailable between 09:00-11:00 on Wednesday 11 August. This will allow us time to carry out some system updates. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
System downtime
On Saturday 24th July ISS are conducting tests to their networked systems (a ‘Failover proving exercise’) that will mean temporary unavailability of some Library services. Between 09:00 and 17:00 the following services may be unavailable at any time:
- The Catalogue
- MetaLib
- SFX
- The Library Web site
The Library Building will be open as normal, and counter services will be as normal from 10:00-13:00, but self-issue of books will not be available. We apologise for any inconvenience caused. Further information on the exercise can be found here: http://www.lancs.ac.uk/iss/news/today/failover-exercise.htm
Library System Upgrade
During the week beginning 5th July the Library Management System (Aleph) will be receiving an upgrade from our supplier. Our Aleph system runs the Catalogue and we use it to issue books to you, buy books from publishers, and organise our large range of materials.
Most of the changes in this version are in the ‘back-end’ of the system, but we are announcing a new development for our users: We are no longer requiring you to use your Library Card number and password to log in to the Catalogue and MetaLib. Instead we will be asking you for your Lancaster network (Windows) username and password – no more having to remember two accounts!
We hope to keep any downtime to a minimum, but there is always a point where we have to ‘switch things off’ for a little while as we migrate the huge amount of data to the upgraded system. We will be posting updates here and on our Facebook page, so please keep checking, especially if you are planning to travel to the Library.
We will be open as usual, and although the upgrade does not apply to our MetaLib service that too may be down intermittently for a little while whilst we make the changes related to the new log in method.
What's New @ Lancaster University Library 