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Library & Technology
Turchin Library
The Tulane Libraries, including the Turchin Library, pay annual subscription fees to a number of commercial vendors to gain access to copyrighted articles, indexes, and full text databases. Access to these is limited contractually to current Tulane students, staff, and faculty with active e-mail accounts. We use a proxy server method of authenticating users, developed by EZ Proxy.
To connect to these resources, first go to the Turchin Library Home Page. In the middle of the page, find the phrase "Click here to login for off campus database access". Once this is accessed, a prompt will be displayed asking for a Tulane e-mail user ID and password. This is to verify the fact that the person seeking to gain access is, in fact, a current student, faculty or staff person. Keep in mind that this is your Tulane e-mail ID (without the @tulane.edu part) and password, and not the Freeman School network ID and password that allows you to access the computer network within the Freeman School.
For additional questions regarding access, please e-mail horn@tulane.edu or call 504-865-5311 or 504-865-5376.
Have questions about getting to the Library's online resources from off-campus? Check below in our frequently asked questions for help.
All of our online resources should be available from on or off campus to all Tulane University affiliates - those with active rs6000 usernames and passwords. This includes resources such as online journals, databases, indexes, newspapers, ebooks, etc.
To authenticate yourself with the proxy server, you will need your Tulane University email name and password for your email account. You can use any Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as AOL, BellSouth, a cable modem, or a DSL provider. If you use one of these methods to access the Library's web site, you will have to login to our proxy server in order to authenticate that you are affiliated with Tulane University.
You will have to authenticate when you try to access any of our licensed digital resources. The username and password you need to use are those for your rs6000 account, which is your Tulane email account. For example, if my email was: superlibrarian@tulane.edu, my username is superlibrarian and my password is the same one that I would use to access my email.
If you have tried your username and password and it doesn't seem to be working, you can test your logon information to make sure you are using the correct username/password. Try to access your webmail account by going to: http://webmail.tulane.edu. If you can't get in, you need to contact Technology Services to check on your account. If you can get into webmail, but are getting an invalid account/password error from the proxy server, or if you don't know your Tulane username and password, you also need to contact TS - the help desk number is: (504) 862-8888.
There are several ways to get to the proxy server. If you are accessing our resources from off campus, there will be an additional option near the bottom of the "Help & Guidance" section of the homepage. It says: "Are you off campus and would like to access our database resources? Please log in." By clicking on the link, you will be forwarded on to the proxy server. Once you have logged on, you will be returned to the page you clicked the link from, in this case, the Library's homepage. This link to the proxy server is also available at the top of all of the various database resource list pages. (Since you don't need them while using an on-campus computer, the links should never appear while you are using a computer in the Library or elsewhere on campus.)
Once you have logged on to the proxy server, you should not need to login again to use other resources. However, if you do encounter problems accessing additional resources, try re-logging on to the proxy server. There are several reasons you may have to log in again. A few of them are:
- You may have been timed out of the proxy server.
- You may have been timed out of the database you were using.
- You may have unintentionally logged out of the proxy server by closing the database/window you were originally logged in on. If this happens frequently, please report the problem.
If you are logged on, but still having problems finding or accessing the needed resource, some possible scenarios are listed below.
While our library catalog is a wonderful resource for finding materials in the library, don't try to access online journals through it - use the e-journal title list, available from the Research section of the homepage, instead. The catalog is not proxied - so those links only work if you are on campus or dialing in through the Tulane dial-up connection. However, if you go through the e-journals list, all of those pages are proxied, so you can authenticate prior to accessing e-journal title you are interested in.
We do not have complete full text runs for all journals - so double-check to make sure that we really are supposed to have access to a particular journal. You can do this by looking at the years of access in the e-journal title list and also looking in the library catalog. Several vendors will list all of their online journals in their database, even though we don't own access to all of those journals. This understandably leads to confusion, so check both the catalog and the e-journals list to see if we truly should have access to the full text of the journal.
The login page for the proxy server is a Tulane-branded white page with a box for a username and a box for a password, with instructions on what to use for each. If you are getting a login page that is brand specific - for example, "Please enter your ProQuest password." - this indicates that you are not going through the proxy server. Make sure you are going through the library web site and authenticating before you get to the digital resource. Since we pay (quite a bit of money) for these digital resources, they are not available to everyone with Internet access. You have access to them strictly because you are affiliated with Tulane University. While you can get to a resource directly if you are on campus, this is because you are automatically being authenticated by Tulane University's IP range. If you try to go directly to JSTOR for example, using your own Internet Service Provider, JSTOR will have no way to verify that you are affiliated with Tulane University and will not give you access. If you go through the library web site, and authenticate, this tells the vendor that you belong to the Tulane license agreement.
Many of our resources have a limited number of simultaneous users - when all of the available "seats" are being used, sometimes you will get an error message and other times the product will forward you to a login screen. If this appears to be the problem, try the resource again in a few minutes for one of the available seats to open.
The NetLibrary interface is a bit different from our other online resources. In order to access an ebook, you need to create a personal account. This is an account only recognized by NetLibrary; it is NOT your Tulane University username/password. This account information can be any username and password that you want to use. If you forget your username/password, you can request a reminder from NetLibrary - the Howard-Tilton Library does not have access to this information, so we are unable to access/reset your NetLibrary account. Even after authenticating through the proxy server, you will still need to use your NetLibrary account information in order to check out ebooks. We recommend that you set up your NetLibrary account while you are on campus. If you are off-campus and having difficulty setting up a NetLibrary account, you can come in to the Library, or anywhere on campus to set up your NetLibrary account or you can call the Information & Reference Desk (504) 865-5605 for assistance in setting up your account. (Please have your Tulane ID with Library barcode ready for verification that you are a Tulane University affiliate.)
Sometimes our online resources experience a technical problem. There might be a problem with the server, or even scheduled upgrades when a database might be unavailable for a short time. To verify a resource is not functioning, you can contact the Turchin Library at (504) 865-5376, or the Howard-Tilton Information and Reference Desk (504) 865-5605 to have them test whether the resource is functioning on campus. Since we have so many resources available, we rely on our patrons to let us know when they experience a problem with any of our resources. This helps us get started on restoring access as soon as possible.
Last Updated 10/28/09
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