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

[Mandi Schwarz]

We provide alumni access to a subset of our resources. Our alumni office was thrilled when we got this set up a few years ago. Here’s our list: http://library.unbc.ca/using-library/circulation/alumni-electronic-resources

Systems: We are using III’s Sierra for an ILS and EZProxy for off-campus authentication.

Authentication: Users authenticate via LDAP and/or their library barcode. They have a designated ptype of alumni in both Sierra and the LDAP database. We use groups in EZProxy to control access. Alumni have access to ONLY the resources identified for their use, and other users have access to both the alumni resources and the rest of our authenticated resources (which we identify as “Group Default”). Alumni library accounts expire every year, and they must contact the library if they want continued access. The alumni designation is available to former UNBC students only.

Identifying resources: The majority of our alumni-accessible resources are consortia resources where the consortium has negotiated for alumni access. Others are ones with permissive “Authorized Users” definitions in the licenses. As such, this comes at no additional cost to us. I don’t believe we have actively pushed for alumni access when negotiating directly with a vendor – as far as I am aware, we ask for alumni access rights and if they refuse, we carry on negotiating the license for our current users (faculty, staff, students; we try to get walk-in access when we can as well).

As far as workflow considerations, there are only three: identifying “alumni” as an authorized user in the license record; adding the resource to the correct config section in EZProxy (and checking for any conflicts with the Group Default resources); and manually updating the list on the website.

The only problem we have encountered is multi-collection platforms that have separate licenses for separate resources/collections. For example, we have alumni access to Forest science from Ovid, but not to any other Ovid resources such as LWW; as such, we have not enabled alumni access to Forest science. This is a limitation of using a single EZProxy instance for both groups. As we are essentially providing a free “bonus” service to our alumni without additional funding, we will not be setting up a separate EZProxy server to remedy this.

Hope this helps!
Mandi

Mandi Schwarz
Library Assistant - Serials
University of Northern British Columbia
250-960-6455; Mandi.Schwarz at unbc.ca
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