[WEB4LIB] ejournals, authentication, and the OPAC

[Eric Hellman]

One of the main goals of our Link.Openly system 
(http://www.openly.com/link.openly/) is to make the job of presenting 
and using a library's e-journals much easier. But there's quite a bit 
of work to do before it's actually a solution you can use.

Just wanted you to be aware of what was on the horizon!

Authenticating off-campus users is another can of worms. My personal 
opinion is that only VPN-like solutions (which essentially turn 
off-campus users into virtual on-campus users) are likely to be 
robust and unobtrusive.

Eric

>Hi all,
>
>We've been struggling with the question of how to show the public
>which journals we provide electronically, full-text. There are
>many single titles and even more titles that we get via
>EBSCOHost, SilverPlatter, and other aggregators.
>
>After much discussion we are thinking that placing the records in
>our OPAC may be the best way to go, rather than creating a
>separate database that we could publish to the web. There will be
>URLs in the MARC records so that the patron can go straight to
>the ejournal or to the aggregator that provides it. However, once
>this idea gained approval, the question of authentication (for
>off-campus users) raised its head. (by the way, we have a new
>Sirsi Unicorn system)
>
>My multi-part question is:
>Are others of you experiencing success in downloading records
>from an aggregator, such as EBSCOHost, and loading them into your
>OPAC? (In our case, we are talking about 13,000 or so titles from
>several aggregators)
>
>Also, what is your model for authenticating off-campus users when
>they look at a MARC record for an electronically-available
>journal in your OPAC and click on the link? What method do you
>use to determine that they are valid users?
>
>We think that we currently have ways to make all of this work,
>but I am quite interested to hear your experiences. If some of my
>questions aren't clear (they are hard to phrase in an email)
>please let me know and I'll try to elaborate.
>
>Thanks in advance,
>
>Barton Spencer
>Assistant to the Dean of Libraries
>The University of Southern Mississippi
>barton.spencer at usm.edu

Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           21st Century Information Infrastructure