[Eril-l] Proquest EbookCentral, single signon, ezproxy - question about weird problem

[Melissa Belvadi]

Hi, I'm working with Proquest support on this but so far we're confused and
I'm hoping someone else ran into this and found a solution.

This would only apply if you have Proquest Ebook Central configured to use
their Single SignOn service.  That enables users on campus to get from our
ezproxy server (without being bothered to login) a hashed identity code so
they can use all of the interface features of someone with an account in
the platform, without actually making one and revealing their identity.

What Proquest apparently does is talk to our proxy server, even when the
link is not proxied and the user is on campus, to get that hashed identity
code. The user is not prompted for a username/password in this, so I'm not
sure how ezproxy could even be doing this.

We're finding that multiple users are getting the same hashed identity. The
way this showed up is when one staff member used up most of the allocation
of pages that could be downloaded, and another staff member on a different
computer accessed the same book, they saw the allocation already used up.
They brought it to me, where I verified on my own computer in three
different web browsers the same problem.  You can see the problem by
looking in settings-profile and note the same hashed-garbage username in
all of the affected sessions throughout all those different computers and
browsers.

Have any of you seen this before and if so, did you find a solution short
of abandoning the SSO service from Proquest?

Melissa Belvadi
Collections Librarian
University of Prince Edward Island
mbelvadi at upei.ca 902-566-0581
my public calendar
<http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=mbelvadi%40upei.ca&ctz=America/Halifax&mode=week>
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