Accessing Permalinks from Off-Campus

Hi all! Hope everyone had a good T-Day. I've gotten an excellent question from Amy B. and I thought that you all might be interested in the answer.

One of her students was having trouble accessing EBSCOhost permalinks from off-campus and emailed asking for the EBSCOhost password.

We don't have an individual student login for EBSCOhost, or any of our other databases. We use proxy software called EZproxy to authenticate our students from off-campus, and GALILEO has proxy software as well.

Some GALILEO databases will automatically append a proxy referral URL to permalinks. (EBSCO is one of them, so I still haven't figured out how this student got an unproxied permalink.) This proxy referral URL will allow the user to be authenticated when clicking on the link. (It might ask them for the GALILEO password. I'm on-campus right now, so I can't test that.)

Here's what a proxied permalink from Academic Search Complete looks like. The section in bold is the proxy referral URL. That "dek1" represents GPC.

http://proxygsu-dek1.galileo.usg.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5507063&site=ehost-live

If the URL just said something like this ...

http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=5507063&site=ehost-live

... then it isn't proxied, and patrons wouldn't be able to use it smoothly from off-campus.

Databases that we subscribe to outside of GALILEO are still proxied, but the proxy referral URL looks a little different.

http://ezproxy.gpc.edu:2048/login?url=http://www.artstor.org

But how does it all actually work, you say? Well, that's a great question. Here it is in a nutshell.

When you are off-campus, you are outside of our IP range. The IP range is how the databases recognize you as an authorized user, e.g. paying customer. If you're using a permalink without a proxy referral URL, the databases don't know that you are an authorized user and they don't let you in. The good news is, this is very easy to remedy.

If you open a permalink and get some message about not being logged in, open another browser window and log into EZproxy. You can do this by going to our list of databases (http://www.gpc.edu/library/articles.htm), clicking on any one of them, and entering your GPC login and password on the screen provided. Then, open your permalink and it should work just fine.

Remember, that EZproxy operates by placing a cookie on your PC. So, if you have your browser set to delete cookies when you close the browser window, you'll need to leave a window open at all times or you'll be logged out of EZproxy. If this happens, you can always log back in.

I have a webpage set up that offers some more details about off-campus database access, if you'd like to take a look. (http://www.gpc.edu/library/ezproxy.html)

That's the basic gist of it, but if you have any further questions, please let me know. Also, please feel free to copy and paste this post into an email, cannibalize it for a LibGuide, whatever you need to do with it.