[Eril-l] OpenAthens experience

[Trisha Burr]

Thank you to all who have replied to me!

Just to summarize some things I've heard.

1) *Why move to OA? *Our library purchased OpenAthens to work with a
specific product on campus. Since we were paying for it, we thought that it
made sense to switch everything to OA. There are some nice features to OA -
our users found it even before I had it completely set up. Students can
Google JSTOR, for example, and login using OA rather then going through our
library site. I can also easily set up different groups of users in admin
and only allow them to use certain products. The statistics are nice to see
but we don't gather any data about who is using what, so it's not as
helpful as it might be. Mainly the statistics are at a platform level.

2) To the person who was waiting for awhile to switch to OpenAthens because
they're using WMS - not a bad idea. However, I feel like I'm slowly working
through many of those issues with OCLC. The main problems we keep
encountering are at the article linking level and it was pretty impossible
to predict this. (Just to note: I've had a great support person at OCLC and
EBSCO too, actually.)

3) To the person who is having trouble with their EBSCO products and
"athenized" links - I found this interesting since, for our EBSCO products,
we don't athenize them. I found that very confusing at first - that some
vendors use the prepend and some use more of a shib formula. I'm not sure
why that wouldn't have been pointed out straight away. Also, I totally
empathize, I often have the experience of getting something to work and
then find out a few days later that it's broken again. This was especially
tricky with Gale since they switched links and platforms this summer. What
worked one day, didn't work the next.

   - And, this leads me to why I posted about this. I guess I thought more
   of these things would have been worked out by now. Don't lots of folks use
   OpenAthens already? I'm not sure why every time I encounter a problem it
   seems like it's a brand new issue.

4) Someone mentioned that due many difficulties with OpenAthens they
switched to a product called, LibLynx. I've never heard of this one before.

That's probably enough for now. If anyone knows of an OpenAthens list
serve, I'd love to sign up for it!
Trisha


On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 4:23 PM Trisha Burr <tburr at macalester.edu> wrote:

> Hi!
> Over the summer our library has been transitioning from EZproxy to
> OpenAthens for authentication. We use OCLC products for discovery and KB
> management.
>
> I'm just sort of curious as to what other folks have experienced as
> they've transitioned to OpenAthens. Trials? Tribulations?
>
> I'll admit, parts of our transition have been a little rocky. Has anyone
> else experienced this?
> Thanks,
> Trisha
>
> --
>
> Trisha Burr
>
> Electronic Resources Librarian
>
> DeWitt Wallace Library
>
> 651-696-6749 | tburr at macalester.edu
>
> 1600 Grand Avenue
>
> Saint Paul, MN 55105 USA
>
> [image: mac-sec-horizontal-logo-150w.jpg]
>
>
>
>

-- 

Trisha Burr

Electronic Resources Librarian

DeWitt Wallace Library

651-696-6749 | tburr at macalester.edu

1600 Grand Avenue

Saint Paul, MN 55105 USA

[image: mac-sec-horizontal-logo-150w.jpg]
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