Library Web Pages ------------Choose A Destination------------ Archives Catalog Catalog Tutorial Circulation Desk Electronic Databases and URL's Friends of the Library Government Documents Information about the Library Library Hours Inter-Library Loan Library Directory Library Instruction New Books Online Style Guides & Writing Tips Quick Reference Reference Desk Resource Guides Search Library Web Pages Spring Hill College HomePage

What is a Proxy Connection?

Normally a user requests documents and web pages directly from an internet site.   Vendors for on-line databases often offer "site licenses" for their products.  To prevent unauthorized users access to services, vendors restrict access by IP address (the "telephone number" used by your computer to communicate over the internet).  So, if  you are not on campus, your IP address does not match an SHC IP address.  Because your IP address in not an SHC address, you are blocked from these services.  (It's the computer version of caller-id.)

Proxy service is one way to accomodate the IP address restrictions.  Once you have been authenticated by our campus as a valid SHC student/staff member, our Proxy server receives your requests for documents and web pages.   Once a request is received, our Proxy server retrieves the information from the vendor using its own on-campus IP address.  When our Proxy server has the information you requested, it then sends it off to you.

Of course having a middle-man adds a level of complexity to the interchange.  For you to receive documents, the request must first come to SHC and then get passed onto the vendor.  The same way with the results, SHC gets the pages and then passes them onto you.  So it may take twice as long to retrieve a document as direct access.

Why do it this way?  The problem isn't the technology of the internet, the problem is scale.  We have upwards of 2,000 individuals belonging to the school who should have access to these services.  That means 2,000 separate usernames and passwords just for our school.  A vendor simply can't keep up with the volume of usernames/passwords for our campus and the hundreds of other schools they sell their services to.  So we manage our own accounts and agree with the vendor that only authorized individuals can "pass through" our school's account to reach their services.

The technology keeps changing so there may be changes to this procedure in the future.  For the time being, the additional time to retrieve information is offset by the convenience of searching from anywhere.

Because of the additional load on the system, we allow proxy requests only to the following sites:

Normally, the "automatic" configuration of proxy service (described here) limits proxy access to these sites only.  However, if you manually configure proxy, please do not be surprised or offended when you are blocked from accessing other sites on the internet.  You can always turn off proxy service and connect directly.