Category Archives: vLib portal

vLib portal

vLib downtime due to scheduled power outage

Due to a scheduled power outage vLib will be unavailable on Wednesday, 17/11/10, from 6 am onwards.

As a a high number of services will be experiencing a downtime, systems will be initialized successively after the outage.

We have done our best to prioritize the start of vLib, however, we are unable to give any more precise point of time when vLib will be available again but between 9 and 12 o’clock in the morning.

MPG/SFX services should be available without interruption.

More info see GWDG News.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

vLib outage ahead (Wednesday 8 September)

The GWDG currently undertakes some necessary construction work in their server room and the vLib server need to be moved to a new location in this context. Therefore, our hosting partner scheduled a downtime for the vLib portal on Wednesday between 07:30 a.m. to approximately 12:00 a.m. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Update from 1 pm: Server restart will be delayed by two hours at least.

vLib server down (Tuesday 24 August)

Unfortunately, the vLib portal is not running at the moment due to server problems at our hosting partner. The responsible system administrators at GWDG work intensely to resume service as soon as possible.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Update from 6 pm: The problems have been caused by a failure of memory devices. The system was restarted successfully in the meantime.

vLib Resource Types revised

Resource types have been revised.

The former resource types Factual Database, ePrint Server, and Subject Gateway are now generally typed as Miscellaneous.

Old links should redirect if defined for interfaces /start or /resource_type (more info on service interfaces).

A complete list of eBook-related resources is now available at http://vlib.mpg.de/start?type=Book%20Collection.

Hence the option eBooks has disappeared from the Special Content dropdown at http://vlib.mpg.de/start?srv=locate. Former deep links, for example http://vlib.mpg.de/start?special=ebooks, should continue to be supported if set up using the above service interfaces.

vLib upgrade planned for Wed 16-09-09

We are planning to upgrade our portal software to MetaLib version 4.3.

Unfortunately, a downtime of several hours will be inevitable, consequently vLib is likely to be unavailable between 08:00 and 12:00 a.m. that day.

We would like to apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

UPDATE (16 September, 12:19): Installation process delayed. Services continue to be unavailable.

UPDATE (16 September, 15:45): Services available again.

Extended metasearches enabled in vLib

To enable extended metasearches, and thus to emphasize the big asset of metasearching (which is covering the widest possible range of information sources in the course of carrying out a single search) the number of resources searchable simultaneously via vLib has been increased significantly.

This enables creating overall search interfaces such as, for example, a search across all MPG Library Catalogs available at

http://vlib.mpg.de/start?module=metasearch&stype=locate&type=MPG%20Library%20Catalog

which may be useful to locate a needle in a haystack.

Of course, users will be deciding whether the usability of huge metasearch interfaces is acceptable. Hence we are curious to have some feedback.

vLib Resource Feeds get down to the nitty-gritty

There had been two major usage scenarios which motivated us to introduce various RSS feeds for vLib resource lists about a year ago:

  1. Updating individual users about new resources available in the Max Planck Society
  2. Enabling MPG librarians or developers to re-use the resource information available in the vLib portal

Our experiences show that the first use case is pretty obvious to most vLib users while the second requires a lot more explanation… but we are willing to share! Check out the revised documentation of the vLib Resource Feeds to get some ideas and working examples.