EZproxy at UK

Background

If you're at the University of Kentucky, you're required to use EZproxy on campus if you want to access an article, journal, or other UK Libraries purchased or licensed source. This change went into effect last spring, as described in a UKNow post last February and in a recent email forwarded by the Vice President for Research. This change also makes accessing paywalled documents extremely cumbersome.

To make life a bit easier, I created the bookmarklet below to help provide more seamless access to subscription sources. If you have a regular (non-EZproxy configured) URL to, for example, a journal article, just click on the bookmarklet in your web browser's bookmark toolbar to convert the URL and access the article.

Bookmarklet: UKY Proxy Shortcut

Use Case and Installation

Say you're sent an email from a colleague with a link to an article like this one:

Although the link goes to an article in a journal that UK Libraries licenses, since it doesn't contain the EZproxy information, you won't have access to it (and you'll likely be asked to pay for it, which is incredibly confusing to students if not also faculty and others). In order to access that article, the URL would have to look like this, as described on the UK Libraries FAQ page for e-Resources:

To avoid having to visit the UK Libraries website, search for the known article or journal title, etc., etc., or change the URL per the suggestion in the e-Resources FAQ (or all the URLs in your syllabus), you can install the bookmarklet below. To install, click, hold, and drag the following link to your bookmarks toolbar (tested in Firefox and Chrome):

Bookmarklet: UKY Proxy Shortcut

Now, when you visit a URL like the regular one above, click on the bookmarklet and it'll add the EZProxy information to the URL. If UK Libraries has access to the source, then you should get access also. You may have to enter your LinkBlue credentials. Works on-campus and off.

Another option: install Zotero. Zotero is a useful bibliographic reference manager and can be configured to recognize UK's EZproxy information and auto-covert URLs without further user action. Other bibliographic managers may offer this too.

C. Sean Burns, PhD
Assistant Professor
School of Information Science
University of Kentucky
sean.burns@uky.edu

Last updated: 08/07/2017

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