Help & Troubleshooting

The following tips are provided for common issues.

For other issues not covered here, please see our contact page for more assistance. You can report technical issues via our feedback form.

Images load slowly in Universal Viewer (spinning square or blurred image)

When an image has been viewed by another user, it is temporarily cached and will load very quickly, but we are not able to cache all images due to the high volume of files in the repository.
The image server used by the repository converts our original high resolution TIF files to web-optimized JPG images on the fly, which may require several seconds of processing time.
Extremely high resolution images may take 10 - 30 seconds to load.
The development teams have been working to identify strategies for speeding up image load times, but this may require changes in our technical infrastructure and/or file preparation workflows.

If you see only a black rectangle with no files or metadata displaying, this indicates a problem with the digital object. Please report this through our feedback form.

If you see this message, it means the content display files have been updated and are being prepared for display.
For images, please wait 1-2 minutes and refresh your screen.
For book objects, this process may take up to 15 minutes.
Once the display information is generated, you should not see this message in the future unless the content files are updated.

Please report missing or generic placeholder thumbnails through our feedback form; these need to be regenerated.

Some image files are provided at a lower resolution which limits their zoom capabilities.

Some portrait-mode images are distorted when downloaded at a smaller size. If you download the larger size option, the image proportions will be corrected.

Some images are made available, but with restrictions. In these cases, you will not see the download or sharing options in the Universal Viewer toolbar.

Not all material has been loaded at the time of our preview launch. At the time of our preview launch, we have loaded all of the Medical Artifacts and Asian Artifacts collections. The Langmuir collection is still being loaded. We have a loaded small number of items from the Yellowbacks collection. We have not begun loading Yearbooks yet. Content will continue to be loaded during the summer, and new collections are in queue to be loaded as well.
In some other cases, items have been suppressed from view, but they are still reflected in the overall count for the collection.

To respect copyright law and other agreements, some users are not authorized to view certain material. Visitors not affiliated with Emory cannot view Emory-only material, and some material can only be viewed onsite in the Rose Library Reading Room. Please view our Contact page for more information.
For Login-required items, if you have an Emory login, click on the Login link in the upper right of the screen. Note that after logging in you will need to repeat your search.

Metadata records created for the Emory Digital Collections were exported from multiple systems. While metadata has been reviewed by metadata specialists from the Emory Libraries prior to ingest, due to the large volume of records imported, some errors have not yet been identified or corrected.
When exact transcriptions of original material are used in metadata, this includes any original misspellings.
For questions about specific Collections’ metadata, please contact the providing Library.

The citation feature provides a suggested citation based on available metadata; you may need to correct or enhance the automatically generated citation based on your needs.

When you perform a highly specific search with many limiters applied, a facet may disappear if it has no applicable results for your search.

In some cases, alphabetical sorting does not behave as expected due to variances in the underlying metadata. The development team will investigate this behavior in future releases.

If you are starting a search from the homepage and only select a date value using the date slider, a search is not triggered.
To limit results by date, start a search first, and then apply the date limit.

This error message indicates that the underlying index of data is temporarily unavailable due to a system or network outage. Please report this error through our feedback form.