[Eril-l] OpenAthens: Pros? Cons?

[Steve Oberg]

Thanks to Melissa for raising this whole thing, because I’m interested in it as well. UPEI’s list of pros and cons is especially helpful.

Having read through and hopefully correctly understood the list, I’m still left with the YMMV (your mileage may vary) attitude, though. Many of the pros of Open Athens (I won’t use OA because that gets confused in my mind with Open Access) are really not necessarily and inherently cons for EZproxy. I don’t see the argument for Open Athens as being a slam dunk (apologies for the sports analogy).

For instance:

  *   Using EZPaarse or related tools (which aren’t that difficult to put in place) allows you to gain some more granular user insights, and to a significant degree, the ability to gain those insights isn’t something special to Open Athens and instead may have more to do with your setup of EZproxy.


  *   Personally I am not persuaded that users will find it uniformly and inherently easier to authenticate via Open Athens when searching non-licensed databases than existing approaches. I’ve used Open Athens in a different environment and didn’t feel like it was necessarily easy from a user perspective. Just an opinion only.


  *   Availability of Open Athens when the campus network is down is not compelling. Locally we already have a good workaround to this extremely rare event that serve us just as well.


  *   The whole aspect of hosted vs. locally managed is also a YMMV thing. Honestly, I *prefer* the control and local access we have to our locally installed EZproxy servers, it works very smoothly, it allows for immediate response and fixing, and our staff are well versed and trained in how to manage EZproxy config changes, and quite frankly, it’s not that hard to do for them. It’s not a huge burden for us at all and in fact is a great boon. I completely understand that other libraries’ experiences may vary greatly here.


What is somewhat compelling in favor of Open Athens without doubt, as I see it, is the personalization features on publisher/content provider sites, and maybe one or two other things. But not a whole lot else as I see it, and according to my own local abilities and setup.

So what I’m saying here is not a passionate defense of EZproxy, nor a passionate attack against Open Athens, but rather suggesting that libraries continue to consider their own setups, configurations, staffing expertise, user feedback, and services (and privacy considerations, as others have already pointed out) very carefully before plunking down the annual (?) subscription cost of Open Athens. Undoubtedly it’s a worthwhile solution for many. But not for all. And btw, EZproxy has an annual subscription cost now, too, so it’s not like it’s free and Open Athens isn’t, but I’m willing to bet that one is way more expensive than the other.

Steve

Steve Oberg
Assistant Professor and Group Leader for Resource Description and Digital Initiatives
Buswell Library, Wheaton College (IL)
+1 (630) 752-5852

President, NASIG<http://www.nasig.org/>
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