Results of Web Proxy Use in Libraries

Peter Murray writes \”Last month a call for participation was posted to several mailing lists for a survey on
web proxy use in libraries. A report based on survey responses is now available at:
pandc.org/proxy/survey/report.html


Seventy-four responses came in from the survey. By far, the most popular use of
proxy servers in libraries is for remote resource access. The turn-key solution
EZproxy was by far the most popular, followed by Innovative\’s Web Access
Management product and the freely available Squid and Apache proxy servers.


Proxies for filtering and proxies for bandwidth conservation are equally popular
reasons in libraries. Microsoft Proxy server is a popular package for these
uses, but a wide variety of software packages are in use. Proxy servers are
also being used to gather statistics on resource use.

The report has numerous anecdotes and information from specific libraries,
including URLs to user documentation, description of systems, and software
packages.


Interested in adding your own library\’s experiences to the report? You can
still take the survey at the URL below; I\’ll periodically recompile the
responses and update the report:
pandc.org/proxy/survey/survey.html \”