[Eril-l] Providing alumni access to databases: technical, legal, and political/financial hurdles

[Steve Oberg]

Luke raises important issues. To answer Erin’s original question first, yes, we provide alumni access but at the moment, only for a single database (ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials). The effort to set this up was very considerable and took me months of persistent experimentation and/or nagging or just pigheadedness to get it to work properly. That was mostly due to local issues working with EZProxy and our campus authentication system, which happened to change midpoint through my effort.

But now that it is in place, it seems to work well as far as I can see, and I’d describe this service as a huge hit for our worldwide alumni. Personally, I’d be in favor of expanding this service to other licensed content, but with limited budget, there is always a tension between providing the most we can for current people vs. serving alumni. I’ve heard from people from all over the globe who’ve used this access. The only downside has been that they then tend to expect access to everything else, not just ATLA.

Although our library director approached our alumni association initially to see if they might be interested in funding this access, the response was negative, so we decided to fund this ourselves. I cannot overstate how important it was to figure out some of the things that Luke highlights such as ensuring that authentication works properly with existing campus authentication. It turned out that alumni had a separate alumni login account administered by the alumni association and that caused a lot of confusion to alumni who wanted to use this database. Unfortunately, there isn’t a single sign on kind of setup and so we fielded a lot of questions about the fact that no, you can’t use your alumni account credentials, you need campus credentials. Thankfully our IT area readily set up instructions for how alumni could obtain these credentials and they fielded the vast majority of calls and emails via their campus helpdesk.

To address other questions…Yes, we created a separate webpage on our site to which we pointed alumni. If you go to library.wheaton.edu and click on the Services tab, the first link is for Alumni, and you can see the page to which I refer.

We created a separate EZProxy instance just for authenticating alumni and used the Groups functionality within EZProxy to control things so that alumni can get to ATLA but not to anything else.

If more detail is needed, let me know, but I hope this helps.

Steve

Steve Oberg<http://www.wheaton.edu/Academics/Faculty/O/Steve-Oberg>
Assistant Professor of Library Science
Electronic Resources and Serials
Wheaton College (IL)
+1 (630) 752-5852

NASIG Executive Board Member-At-Large
[NASIG - http://www.nasig.org]
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