Beyond the Boundaries : Remote Access to Online Resources at the University of Moratuwa Library

Though libraries have invested very high percentage of its annual budget to subscribe e-resources, limited attention was paid to ensure consistent and reliable access of those resources. Many library users access e-resources from outside of the University. Therefore many requests have been made to implement a remote access mechanism for e-resources. The objective of the study was to design a proper remote access mechanism to the users for accessing the e-resources provided by University of Moratuwa library. Publishers have provided access to eresources through Internet Protocol (IP) authentication and not by user identity (user ID) and password. This kind of access created many problems to the users specially for the postgraduate students who do not visit the University regularly as many users need to access e-resources from anywhere, anytime. Using the concept of proxy server, a joint project was conducted between the Center for Information Technology Services (CITeS), University of Moratuwa and the library to provide remote access. Existing Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) was used to authenticate the user access. This allowed remote user to obtain regular, secure access to library e-resources.


Introduction
Computers and related technologies have created a remarkable impact on information dissemination in modern society.Electronic databases, e-books, e-journals and their indexes are the most important information resources for organizing knowledge.Access to online journals, bibliographic databases, online catalogues and the Internet have altered the traditional library usage patterns, behaviors and expectations of modern library users over the last few decades.Online searching has become a norm and users always expect Google or Wikipedia style access to the library resources.Libraries should have a mechanism for supporting these expectations and behaviors to provide a quality customer service and to fulfill their mission to support teaching, learning and research.As a result, many academic institutions have built collections of e-resources to provide a better service to their users.
The University of Moratuwa library is a pioneer technological library serving a broad range of courses in Engineering, Information Technology and Architecture.The University of Moratuwa consists of approximately 3950 undergraduate students, 815 postgraduate students and 290 academic staff members.The 950 students of the Institute of Technology University of Moratuwa (ITUM) also belong to the student community of the University.The library is always committed towards providing access to both print and electronic resources for its patrons in supporting research and curricula.Computers and computer applications have been widely introduced within the library in addition to the integrated library management system (Libsys) introduced in 2000.

Literature Review
Threpathi and Jeevan (2013) have mentioned in their study, that "the use of licensed electronic information resources will continue to expand and in some cases become the sole or dominant means of access to scholarly content in future".The usage level of eresources will be one of performance indicators for future libraries.Therefore conducting user surveys is important to identify the user requirements, problems and solutions towards e-resources.
Many surveys have been conducted to investigate library users' acceptance and use of electronic resources.Their findings have indicated a decrease in the use of print journals suggesting online journals as the most preferred source in finding research literature.Also Threpathi and Jeevan (2013) have highlighted that the usage of e-resources should be consistently monitored to identify the users' attitude, behavior and their mode of searching, browsing and reading.They have further emphasized that according to the results of these studies, library strategies should be modified and properly fine-tuned towards the user needs.Punchihewa (2008) conducted a similar study to identify user attitudes towards online resources at the library, University of Moratuwa.During the period of the study, he analysed the obstacles of the users that had to face when accessing e-resources.
Unavailability of remote access was the prominent obstacle highlighted by many users in that study.Kiriella (2010) has also highlighted the user requests to improve the facilities provided for accessing e-resources collection of the library, University of Moratuwa.In addition, Punchihewa (2012) has emphasized the value of providing remote access for eresources as a key factor to increase the usage level in the study of cost effectiveness of eresources at University of Moratuwa.
Most of the time online resources are offered on the basis of IP based access, allowing the use of these electronic materials only within the institution premises.This is due to various practical issues occurred when the remote access was provided with user namepassword method.Vendors prefer to provide IP based access to prevent unauthorized access.But this is a limitation to the users.Users are always willing to access e-resources from anywhere, anytime.Therefore libraries always should take necessary steps to fill the gap between commercial vendor restrictions and academic user practice.Resnick, Ugaz, Burford and Carrigan (2008) have described the evolution of library electronic resource (ER) problem-reporting help desk that assist the users with ER access problems at the Texas A&M University libraries.They have much attention on frequent requests of the users to ER problem-reporting help desk regarding the remote access mechanism, such as EZProxy (easy Proxy).According to this EZProxy mechanism, all offcampus users are authenticated by logging in through the library web site with a University-issued ID and password.This directs users to the proxy server, which has an IP address recognized by content providers as an on-campus IP (Resnick, Ugaz, Burford & Carrigan, 2008).Covey (2003) has mentioned a more secure access mechanism to e-resources filling the gap between vendor restrictions and user practice called "Shibboleth".This is an architecture that enables organizations to build single sign-on environments that allow users to access web-based resources using a single login.Shibboleth is an Internet2 project developing and testing software to support inter-organizational web authentication and access control (Covey, 2003).Shibboleth provides comprehensive and flexible structure to authenticate the users and to control access to Internet resources and services.The most important feature of this architecture was that it uses the institution's local authentication system to verify the identity of the users.It eliminates the need to create different user IDs and passwords or to worry about the IP address of the computer.
Lightweight Directory Application Protocol (LDAP) was used to provide attributes for controlling the access.

E-Resources at University of Moratuwa Library
Since 2003, the library has been provided access to many online resources.In the beginning of 2003, the IEE initiated giving access to online versions of their journals, along with print subscriptions, on a complimentary basis.Under this scheme, the Library of the has introduced a number of free e-journals and e-books to its users.Table 1 shows availability of subscribed electronic periodical titles during the period of 2009 -2013.The cost of periodicals have increased year by year (generally by 6% annually) and libraries have to spend an increasing percentage of their annual budgets for purchasing periodicals (PURCEL 2000, cited Kidd 2002).In 2013, the University of Moratuwa library has spent Rs.21.58 million for purchasing online periodicals.This is an increase of almost Rs.5.50 million compared to the year 2009.Increase of subscription cost is much significant and it justifies the need to make e-resources available to maximum number of users.Table 2 highlights the library cost for each online periodical format from 2009 to 2013.
It is really important to monitor the usage of online resources as the library has spent very high percentage of its budget to purchase them.According to Kidd (2002), viewing of a full-text article would probably be the most meaningful single statistic to understand the usage level of electronic resources.Table 3 shows the full text article downloads from each database for the period of 2009-2013.Therefore, the majority of the postgraduate students have very limited time to spend in the library or university.This is a critical issue for them to find the time for accessing eresources within the University.The researchers also have the personal experience regarding the student requests on remote access when they conduct different academic programmes to the students.One of the postgraduate students had stated following statement as his comment in the feed-back form after the session on e-resources at library, University of Moratuwa.The statement was "there is no value of these e-resources without having the access from home".This reflects the value of the remote access of e-resources for the users.Therefore as the information professionals, librarians should pay a serious attention to identify and address the issues of users related to remote access of e-resources.

Statement of the Problem
Even though library has subscribed to many e-resources, publishers have provided access through IP authentication and not by user ID and password.Publishers have restricted the access by institutional IP address.Library has provided the range of IP address to publishers when the agreements were signed.In this way, access is possible only within the University premises for all the users.This has created a major barrier for the users who need to access e-resources remotely and mostly through their home desktops.Users always expect to access information from anywhere, anytime.Unavailability of remote access is a critical problem specially for the postgraduate students who do not visit the University regularly.

Objective
As there are frequent inquiries and demands for accessing library e-resources remotely and also to increase the usage, library should provide a proper remote access mechanism for its e-resources by fulfilling the gap between vendor restrictions and user requirement.

Design
The proxy server concept explained by Covey (2003) was applied in providing a solution for remote access problem.Proxy server can be defined as a computer system or an application that acts as an agent for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers.The proxy server controls the transactions between users and real servers (Covey, 2003).
With the solution provided by the library for remote access, the users accessing from outside the University IP range (outside the University) must change their web browser proxy setting according to the instructions provided.Then they must login to the new proxy server using their official University email address and the individual email password.Thereafter, user requests are forwarded to the new proxy server which has University IP address and the proxy server will direct the user requests to the real servers.
The real servers can recognize this as authorized IP to allow access to commercially licensed resources.The proxy server accomplishes the task of authentication and verifying that the user is associated with University of Moratuwa.Also the proxy server accomplishes the task of access control and verifying to the publishers' server that the user is authorized by University of Moratuwa to receive their licensed materials.
It is needed Lightweight Directory Application Process (LDAP) or Single Sign On (SSO) system for the authentication process of the user IDs and passwords.The LDAP is an application protocol for querying and modifying directory services running over TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) (Liu & Shih, 2008).Covey (2003) has further explained LDAP directory as a repository of user and group information.Each user or group has an entry in the directory with associated fields such as user's name, email address, department, user ID and password etc. Authentication services contact LDAP server to get user information which are needed to access control.The SSO authentication process enables the users to access multiple web-based resources by entering their user names and passwords only once (Covey, 2003).
Using this concept, a joint project was conducted between Center for Information Technology Services (CITeS), University of Moratuwa and the library to provide remote access.The 'Squid' software was used to create the new proxy server at University of Moratuwa which enables the remote access for the users.Squid is a web proxy cache server application which provides proxy and cache services for Hyper Text Transport Protocol (HTTP), File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and other popular network protocols.It University of Moratuwa gained access to 17 online journals in 2003.After that, the Library started to purchase online databases in 2004 with two databases other than IEE.Also from 2005 to 2008, Sri Lanka gained free country-wide access for 5 online databases and 4 websites of academic publishers under the PERI (Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information) project with the assistance of the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency / Department for Research Cooperation (SIDA/ SAREC).In year 2013, the Library has subscribed to 5 full text databases and 28 individual online journals and magazines.ACM Digital Library, Emerald, IEEE Explore, Grove Art Online and Science Direct are databases available for year 2013.The University of Moratuwa Library is not in a position to purchase all the modules of the above databases due to budgetary constraints.Considering the needs of different departments, some sections or modules of the databases have been subscribed.The access is provided only for engineering and environmental modules along with thirteen (13) individual journals in ScienceDirect database.The Emerald Management Xtra 175 package of the Emerald database and the ASPP package (All Society Periodical Package) of the IEEE database are the other database packages available for the research community of the University of Moratuwa.Other than these subscribed electronic resources, library subscribed databases.These downloads highlight the impact of e-resources on research community at University of Moratuwa.Though the statics indicate high percentage of usage of e-resources, according to the study conducted byPunchihewa (2008) postgraduate students have faced many difficulties in accessing library materials.The lack of time to come to the library was the most prominent reason for the minimum usage of materials by the postgraduate students.Most of the postgraduate students are employed and most postgraduate courses are conducted on a part time basis or as weekend courses.

Table 1 : Subscribed periodical titles (2009-2013) at University of Moratuwa library
According to the above data, University of Moratuwa library has offered the access to over 900 online journals for its users during 2009 -2013.Other than the journals included in the databases, the library has subscribed to some individual online journals according to the requirements of the departments.The number of subscribed individual online journals has been reduced from 2009 to 2013.The library decided to discontinue some online journals due to the low usage.In 2013, there are 33 individual online journals.

Table 3 : Yearly distribution of full text downloads (2009 -2013)
** Up to June 2013For year 2012, Emerald database had the maximum number of full text article downloads.According to the table 3, large number of full text articles has been downloaded from the