vLib portal
A software component will be upgraded on Wednesday, 24/11/10, in the course of our scheduled maintenance hours.
Since the upgrade requires approximately 2 hours downtime of vLib, the installation will be started at 07:00 a.m. Services are expected to be back by 09:00 a.m.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
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.
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.
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 resources may now be located by means of a tag cloud based on controlled and free keywording of resources.
The tag cloud is available as an external service (also xml-based), or as a menu option of the vLib views MetaSearch and Find Database.
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.
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.
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.
Due to a technical emergency at the GWDG, the power supply will be turned off at 3 pm for an hour at least.
This outage will affect all information services hosted at the GWDG, including:
All services will be shut down now and restarted successively after 4 pm. We’re sorry for the inconvenience!
There had been two major usage scenarios which motivated us to introduce various RSS feeds for vLib resource lists about a year ago:
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.