Q. What is authentication (and geolocation)? How is it used in electronic resource/database access?

You probably logged onto your work computer with a username and password today, right? Congratulations, you’ve been authenticated!

In the context of electronic resource sharing, authentication refers to how users are permitted to use database collections – it can vary from institution to institution, and from vendor to vendor.

The MBLC offers a method of authentication for statewide database access called geolocation. At its simplest, when a user’s IP address is verified to be in Massachusetts, access is granted.

If a library licenses a number of databases locally, as some academic institutions do, authentication is done with a "go-between" (or proxy) server such as EZProxy.