Scholars Portal availablity

Our vendor is in the process of upgrading the software for the Scholars Portal this week, so you may encounter problems with the software over the next couple of days. If you do, please send email to me, dhwong@usc.edu and I will forward problems to our vendor for resolution.

When the upgrade is complete, you will see the following improvements to the system:

Open URL links will be available to a select number of our providers (Proquest, Thompson, BioOne, Kluwer/Springer, Wiley, JSTOR, ACM, Ingenta, & Project Muse) I'm trying to resolve configuration and other issues with our other providers) as well as Homer.

Some of the profiles will have collections arranged in subject hierarchies within the profiles to make reviewing by subject within a profile easier.

You can now filter by date either using the Advanced Search or after an initial search.

You can sort full-text items (those with 856 fields and OpenURL links) so that they appear together at the top of a list.

Based on usability testing and the fact that we don't really offer the services in the way they were originally intended, we've removed some choices off the left nav bar (Link Builder, Account Details, Saved Searches, Search Profiles). We've also removed the Links to Additional Resources at the bottom of the page, because it was confusing to users. We've limited the number of choices in advanced search to author, title, subject and keyword. We're hoping this makes the interface a little easier to use.

Deborah Holmes-Wong, Project Manager, IDM