Dawsonera - ongoing maintenance

Please see the latest message from Dawsons below:

Dear Customer

As you know, we have recently been working hard to resolve a number of issues on dawsonera, and we would like to update you on our findings.

Title Ingestion
Since the start of January, we have added over 6000 titles to era in order to fix the perceived delay in adding new content onto dawsonera. We have increased the available resource with our supplier to address the backlog of some titles being loaded, allowing a fourfold increase in productivity. We anticipate the backlog to have reduced within a week. Some titles have been available on dawsonenter but not on dawsonera as a result of incorrect or incomplete metadata from publishers. This detail is currently being resubmitted and this will be resolved as soon as possible.

PDF Downloads
We have been tracking the PDF download time, as this has slowed significantly recently, causing understandable frustration. We have been working with our partners at Adobe to address this, resulting in two maintenance releases last week. While this has shown some small improvements, we continue to work closely with Adobe to resolve this issue in full. We have a further maintenance release on 30th January where the ‘cancel download’ dialogue box will be made clearer for users.

BT Maintenance work
Separately from any of the issues above, BT have notified us of maintenance work on all internet lines on Saturday 1st February at 4pm. This short outage will affect all Smiths News data, including dawsonenter and dawsonera. We anticipate that the site to be down for up to 30 minutes.

We apologise for the continued inconvenience you and your patrons are experiencing, and please be assured we are working hard across the business and with our partners to resolve. Thank you for your continued patience.

Update from Dawsonera

Please see the message below from Dawson regarding downloading e-books:

Dear Customer,

Following our release last week to address the problems that users were experiencing when downloading content, we are pleased to report that we have seen some improvement in download speeds this week. We still feel that this should work more quickly, however, and will continue to work with our technical specialists in order to make any further improvements where possible.

We are aware of an issue that customers are experiencing where content is unavailable and have seen the message “this title is coming soon to dawsonera”. We are still working to resolve this issue and will be performing a software upgrade on Thursday 23rd January to help resolve the problem – no downtime will be incurred while this is upgrade is performed. 

Heritage search using Media dropdown

The enquiry index rebuild failed on Tuesday evening which has affected the ability to use the Media dropdown in Advanced Search.

As everyone needs to be logged out of Heritage for the indexing process to be re-run there hasn't been a convenient time to carry this out since the process failed.

To help avoid this happening in future please could everyone ensure that they either click on Exit System at the bottom left of the screen or use File and Exit to log out of Heritage as this helps to ensure that the link to the server is closed properly.

Key Note update

The Times They Are A-Changin'... www.keynote.co.uk is changing its look At Key Note, we believe that accessing and using business intelligence should be as simple as possible... and we're sure you feel the same. How you feel about the service we offer is important and we try to use this feedback when we update and develop our products. With this in mind, we have made some changes to the homepage at www.keynote.co.uk, which we think will make using the platform even easier: >  COMING SOON... Later this month, we will be refreshing the homepage with a few adjustments to further improve usability. Prior to these changes being released, we will add a message to www.keynote.co.uk. to notify you in advance. As you can see from the image below, all of our products will now be accessed directly from the Key Note homepage, using one of the four tabs under the familiar headings of Market Reports, Company & People, List Builder and Benchmarking.

>  Company & People Information will be merged within one tab and so will be searchable from one point. >  Your login and gateway links for Athens and Shibboleth will now be displayed more prominently. >  We have tidied up the homepage to ensure that those links used more frequently have priority.

Dawson download update

Please see the message below from Dawson about this issue.

Dear Customer,

There are currently some issues regarding the download function on dawsonera which we have been working to resolve over the last few days. We have now made some immediate temporary changes to re-enable this function while we prepare and test a permanent solution over the next few days. We are taking this approach in order to thoroughly investigate the situation so that we can then assure you there will be no further risk to disruption of service later on.

Once we are completely confident about the resolution to this issue we will send out a confirmation.

We apologise to you and your users of this service for the inconvenience caused by these errors. A further update will follow as soon as possible.

Thank you

Jane JohnsonHead of UK Library Sales 

Dawsonera download problems

Dawsons have tweeted the following messages relating to the download facility for e-books:

@dawsonera
The facility to download ebooks on dawsonera is currently unavailable.  We are working to restore the service as soon as possible.

@dawsonera
We have switched the download function off.  The download button still shows but cannot be used & "downloads are currently disabled" appears.

@dawsonera
we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience whilst we resolve this issue.

Please spread the word to staff and students - the tweets were re-tweeted from the LRC account and announcement will be out shortly.

New image resource

We have signed up for free access for a year to the PYMCA courtesy of JISC.




This photo library contains over 100,000 images of social history and youth culture spanning more than 150 years.  Content featured includes, but is not limited to, fashion, music, art, design, travel, social issues, lifestyles, sports, nightlife...

PYMCA Education

This offers a huge and fully researched reference archive of over 35,000 images, thousands of essays, interviews, texts, trends and insight reports, magazine back issues, and links relating to modern (1940+) social history and youth culture.

Please take a look and pass on the details to staff and students who will find this resource useful (the link can be found on Moodle in the Images section of the E-resources page). Users will need to use the 'Login via your home institution' option for access.