General discussion
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Topic
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Off-campus user authentication
LockedI am the web coordinator for a small college. One of the services our web site provides to our students is access to commercial library databases, for which the college pays. Most of the database providers require “user authentication” for access; that is, they want to know that the users accessing their databases are legitimate students/associates of the paying institutions. Unfortunately, many of these services are going to IP recognition. This works fine if a student is on campus and the “system” recognizes the campus IP range, but obviously if they are off campus — which is about 85% of the usage — the database doesn’t recognize their IP.
We’ve been advised away from a proxy server by our ISP. Is there any other way to authenticate off-site users, short of registering every IP they could possibly ever use (which is not an option, btw)?
Our students are not all geographically close to either of our campuses; and for the most part they are techno-challenged. Asking themto download or reset