A brief guide to resource access at DBS part 1

This post is long and dull, but will give some insight into how and why you access electronic resources at DBS the way that you do.
The A to Z journal list, incredibly enough, is an A to Z listing of all the journals, magazines and reports accessible through the library. Some, a very small number are subscribed to directly by the library and hard copies are available to browse or photocopy in Aungier St or Portobello. The A to Z entry for such a journal will say something along the lines of "Print copies available in Aungier St". The vast majority of journals however are only available electronically. Again, the vast majority of journals available electronically are via electronic resources to which the library subscribes. Because we pay money for them, we have a licence to use them. One of the conditions of the licence is that we grant access only to current students and staff. At DBS there are two ways of doing this:

• IP authentication: every computer linked to the Internet has an IP address - which allows the computer to communicate with the Internet. The library registers with the electronic resource provider a list of IP addresses which are allowed to access a particular resource. The only IP addresses that we know are the colleges own, so IP authentication is used to grant access to resources on campus
• Referring URL: when you click on a link to visit a web page, there's a lot going on behind the scenes; as well as the IP address of the computer, the URL of the page from which the link was clicked is also sent. This can be used to record information about visitors, but it can also be used to restrict access to websites. Access to DBS resources off-campus is by referring URL. The URL in question is the link embedded in the 'Search All Resources' image on the library home page. This page cannot be accessed off-campus without having first logged in with your username and password, hence it's reasonably secure. A small minority of users may have problems with I'll detail in part 2.

Consequently, when you access the A to Z journal list off-campus and click on a link to a specific journal, access will be denied because the referring URL, the A to Z journal list URL, is not recognised as one which grants access to those resources. If you're on-campus, your IP address is registered and so you get access.
I know what you're thinking right now: "Why don't you make the A to Z journal list a referring URL?" We couldn't do that unless we restricted access to the A to Z journal list. "So why don't you do that?" We don't so this because we firmly believe that the library, and library resources are marketing tools; we want potential students to see what we have available in the library, because we think that we have a very good selection of resources (your opinion of course, may differ) Making the list of electronic resources and the A to Z journal list publically available facilitates this.
Hence on-campus, you can use the A to Z to gain direct access to journals, off-campus you can use it to identify electronic resources where you can access the journal via 'Search All Resources'