Subject: Re: Access from publisher?
Donnie Curtis (dcurtis@admin.unr.edu)
Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 12:06:50 -0700
From: "Donnie Curtis" <dcurtis@admin.unr.edu> To: <arl-ejournal@arl.org> Subject: Re: Access from publisher? Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 12:06:50 -0700 Message-Id: <000001bef31a$d02a87a0$7e3cc586@ghost2.library.unr.edu> In-Reply-To: <3.0.32.19990830171136.006af1e0@pop3.NL.net>
Anke,
I did not see an e-mail address for direct response to your questions,
so I'm sending it to the list:
On Mon, 30 Aug 1999, Anke de Looper <anke.delooper@benjamins.nl> wrote:
>
> 1) Libraries seem to favor IP-controlled access over passwords. Is that
> so, and why? I thought passwords would allow greater flexibility in
> offering access to patrons even if they are off-site. Also, IP
> authentications is problematic (see ARL-EJOURNAL messages in
> February about JANET cache).
Many libraries have solved the access-to-off-site-patrons problem
through proxy servers. In our case, our ILS provider, Innovative,
has a module called "Web Access Management" that helps us authenticate
remote users. My university doesn't provide PPP web access to
undergraduates, they need to go through commercial internet providers,
so IP access for them will only work with an authentication system
that asks for their library card number. We also had a cache issue,
but we've solved that by having a "stop list" of URLs for our
IP-accessible databases and e-journals, so the caching server doesn't
cache the traffic to those sites.
Even with these IP access issues, we prefer it to passwords because
distributing passwords to all of our 14,000 potential users would be
a nightmare, and would be less secure than IP-controlled access.
Then, they would lose them or forget them, especially if their use
of the journal or database is occasional. We offer hundreds of
electronic services, so it would be impossible to manage password
distribution for all of them. Our users have made it clear that they
don't like password access even if it allows them to customize their
access and get special services (some publishers still require users
to come up with their own user name and password in addition to
IP-controlled access, and users don't like that, either).
> 2) Do libraries (prefer to) download an issue of an electronic journal
> once, to offer access to patrons from a local server, or is the
> issue/document downloaded from the publisher's server by each
> patron in turn? Does this depend on what the publisher allows?
We prefer to have the users go to the publisher's server, because again,
it would be difficult to stay on top of when new issues come along for
the 2,000 journals we offer, and also we would not have the space on our
server. We don't know which articles (or even which issues) will be
accessed for specialized journals, so we prefer the "just-in-time"
approach.
Donnelyn Curtis
Director of Research Services
University of Nevada, Reno, Library
<dcurtis@admin.unr.edu>
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