Survey Results: Web Proxy Use in Libraries

[Peter Murray]

Last month a call for participation was posted to WEB4LIB for a survey 
on web proxy use in libraries.  Based on the number of people who said 
they responded to the survey based on the call posted to this list, I'm 
posting this announcement of results and executive summary.

A report based on survey responses is now available at:

  <http://www.pandc.org/proxy/survey/report.html>

Seventy-four responses came in from the survey.  By far, the most 
popular use of proxy servers in libraries is for remote resource 
access.  The turn-key solution EZproxy was the most popular, followed 
by Innovative's Web Access Management product and the freely available 
Squid and Apache proxy servers.

Proxies for filtering and proxies for bandwidth conservation are 
equally popular reasons in libraries.  Microsoft Proxy server is a 
popular package for these uses, but a wide variety of software packages 
are in use.  Proxy servers are also being used to gather statistics on 
resource use.

The report has numerous anecdotes and information from specific 
libraries, including URLs to user documentation, description of 
systems, and software packages.

Interested in adding your own library's experiences to the report?  You 
can still take the survey at the URL below; I'll periodically recompile 
the responses and update the report:

  <http://www.pandc.org/proxy/survey/survey.html>

Thanks to everyone who participated!


Peter
--
Peter Murray, University of Connecticut Law School     proxy at PandC.org
"Proxy Web Servers and Authentication"     http://www.PandC.org/proxy/