Authenticated Off-Net Access to Commercial Library Resources
- Published:
- Briefs, Case Studies, Papers, Reports
- Author(s) and Contributors:
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- Source(s) and Collection(s):
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Collection(s): CAUSE/EFFECT (Archives)
Abstract
Most college and university libraries make commercial information databases available to their patrons. The agreements under which such resources are distributed typically require that access be limited to institutionally affiliated patrons. The authors examine three options for providing out-of-domain access to IP-filtered databases: HTTP referrer checking, CGI script-based surrogate browser, and proxy server. Then the authors present their solution. MSU-Bozeman solved the authentication problem utilizing open-source software consisting of the popular Apache Web server, compiled with the proxy module, running under netBSD on an Intel Pentium processor.