EZProxy Scenario

[Richard James]

I've worked in places that do it either of these two ways, as well as my current location where we use hosted EZproxy. I don't know as one or another has substantial implicit advantages- a lot depends on the competencies of IT staff, librarians, and students. Hosted EZproxy works well for us, because there's no IT involvement, updates and additional resources are implemented quickly, and we don't have to worry about it overmuch- and hosting isn't expensive. We have the EZproxy prefix on all of our links wherever we can find them, as well as configured in EBSCO etc. for permalinking.

Either with hosted, where it's definitely not a concern, or with a local EZproxy, I wonder if the concept of 'overloading' is all that likely. So many of your users trying to access high-quality resources simultaneously? What an amazing problem! If that was the case I would think it is incontrovertible evidence that a more robust server is needed.

In my last job, access went via your alternative hypothetical. While it did add the factor of having to log in to do anything, even to see the page with the links, students were well used to doing that anyway so I don't really believe it added any hurdles for access. I do, however, think that it added some complexity to ours and faculty's ability to provide deep links to articles etc in subscription resources. This may just have been a peculiarity of our setup though, but it's so much easier to slap the EZproxy prefix on a permalink so faculty can add it to blackboard or email it to students, etc.

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2014-01-17