Tag Archives: Service Outages

Problems with Format Limits (“Scopes”) in MIDCAT (Library Catalog)

MIDCAT, the Library catalog, is currently experiencing some problems with searches limited to certain media formats (“scopes” in library lingo).   This problem is affecting searches limited to formats selected from the drop-down menu as well those selected using the tabs across the top of the search screen:

MIDCAT limits not currently working

Specifically:  searches using AUTHOR, TITLE, etc., indexes in combination with the format limits are NOT working properly (we definitely have CDs with “Beethoven” as the author!):

The easiest way to work around this might be to simply use a KEYWORD search.  KEYWORD searches in combination with the limits (scopes) seem to be unaffected:

If a KEYWORD search returns too many results, or is undesirable for some other reason, another way to work around this issue is as follows:

1) Perform a search of any kind WITHOUT using one of the media limits.  This search can be a search of a specific index (e.g., AUTHOR, TITLE, SUBJECT, etc.) or a KEYWORD search.

2) Once you receive your results, click either the “Modify Search” button (if you searched by KEYWORD) or the “Limit/Sort Search” button (if you searched using an AUTHOR, TITLE, etc. index)

3) From the next screen, you can choose a format limit and click “Submit”

We apologize for the inconvenience this is causing, and hope to have this corrected soon.

Terry Simpkins
Director, Discovery & Access Services
Davis Family Library 135A
Middlebury College
110 Storrs Ave.
Middlebury, VT 05753
802-443-5045
tsimpkin@middlebury.edu

Upcoming library catalog (MIDCAT) downtime – Monday, June 11

In preparation for our migration of the Middlebury and MIIS library catalogs to a new version of Innovative Interfaces, Inc., software, the library catalog (MIDCAT) will be unavailable on Monday, June 11, 2018.

The library will remain open, but you will not be able to check out, return, or renew materials until the system upgrade is complete.  We do expect Summon (go.middlebury.edu/summon) to remain functional if you need to search our journals and databases, or if you simply want to use it to lookup an item to see if the library owns it.

Thank you for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Terry Simpkins
Director, Discovery and Access Services
Davis Family Library
802-443-5045

MIDCAT downtime tomorrow, Tuesday, 3/6/18

Hello again

This is another reminder that MIDCAT will be unavailable on Tuesday, Mar. 6, between 4AM-8AM.  This includes staff client side functions as well as the webPAC (go/midcat/) and includes all lookup and checkout functions, among other services.

Thank you for your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience.

Terry Simpkins
Director, Discovery and Access Services
Davis Family Library
802-443-5045

Summon slow and/or down

We have received the following from the folks at Summon:

  the Summon service has experienced interruptions in service.  We are aware of the issue and actively working to resolve it.  We will follow up again once we have more detail.

It just took well over a minute to get the search screen when I typed “go/summon” in an address bar. I did a very simple search a couple of minutes ago and the connection timed out. A comment to this post will be added when we become aware that service is restored.

Moodle Infrastructure Maintenance – Thursday, March 7

From our Moodle host:

Dear Valued Client,

In the past few weeks, some of our clients have been the target of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks have led to outages for other clients who shared the same internet access points.

To help us detect and prevent this type of attack in the future, Remote-Learner needs to move a critical piece of security infrastructure. The reconfigured hardware will reduce the probability of a successful attack and improve access to the rest of our system during an incident.

We will implement this change during a very brief maintenance window this Thursday, March 7, 2013 at 11:59 PM CST. While the service interruption should not last longer than a couple of minutes, there is a small chance we will require up to 15 minutes.

Thank you for your understanding.

Sincerely,

The Remote-Learner Team