Bookmarklets for Proxy-based Resource Access

UCD provides its staff and students with free access to a number of subscription based resources on the web (e.g., ACM Portal, IEEE Xplore, SpringerLink). Access to these resources while off campus is provided through a proxy, through which we must authenticate. The typical access pattern is as follows:

1. Search for a paper
2. Go to publisher’s website (e.g., portal.acm.org)
3. Manually add .eproxy.ucd.ie to the end of the hostname (e.g., portal.acm.org.eproxy.ucd.ie)
4. Authenticate via the proxy (once a session)
5. Proceed…

All in all, it’s a nice system. However, the Mendeley bookmarklet (which supports the import of meta-data from such sites) doesn’t play nicely with the modified URLs. This leads to a lot of manual alterations to address bars throughout the day.

Thanks to advice from danlea, I’ve created a couple of bookmarklets to automatically add and remove the UCD proxy extension to and from pages. If you’re UCD staff or student, you can drag and drop these directly to your browser toolbar, or add them to your bookmarks. If your organisation uses a similar system, it should be straightforward to replace “eproxy.ucd.ie” in the code with your organisation’s details.

Add eproxy

Remove eproxy