access to electronic serials

[Peter Murray]

--On Tuesday, April 17, 2001 5:26 AM -0700 Sue Shiel <shiel at uwo.ca> 
wrote:

> What guidance can I give him in setting up this site so that
> institutional subscribers can easily access this electronic edition
> of the journal? Is password protection a problem for institutional
> access?

I would offer, "Yes" -- this is a problem for institutional access.  To 
turn the question around:  if you subscribe to a database that offers 
only username/password to provide access, you would have to somehow 
distribute that username/password to all of your users while still 
protecting it from getting published on the Internet for the world to 
know.

Probably the most popular way to authorize institutions for access to 
web services is by IP address authentication.  With most web servers, 
setting up IP address authorizations is just as easy as 
username/password pairs.  I suspect the continuing maintenance for IP 
addresses (subscribers with changing IP address ranges) is just as much 
as with username/password pairs (forgotten passwords and monitoring of 
servers to detect compromised accounts).


Peter
--
Peter Murray, Computer Services Librarian              W: 860-570-5233
University of Connecticut Law School             Hartford, Connecticut