I just went to sign into my safari.oreilly.com account, and it was doing something odd… It somehow identified me as “University of Calgary”, and was offering the entire catalog for me to read! Wow. What an awesome thing! I assume our library bought a campus-wide license (and the safari website must be detecting my IP domain), or, perhaps this is available for all campuses now?
Regardless, very cool! 1165 technology books available at my desktop. Freaking amazing! Thanks to whoever did this!
UPDATE: Looks like it’s part of the University’s subscription to ProQuest – the same subscription that gets us the online journals and newspapers.
UPDATE: IP detection is preventing access from home… Must remember to load up with content while in the office… /sw/bin/wget -r anyone? 🙂
I just went to sign into my safari.oreilly.com account, and it was doing something odd… It somehow identified me as “University of Calgary”, and was offering the entire catalog for me to read! Wow. What an awesome thing! I assume our library bought a campus-wide license (and the safari website must be detecting my IP domain), or, perhaps this is available for all campuses now?
Regardless, very cool! 1165 technology books available at my desktop. Freaking amazing! Thanks to whoever did this!
UPDATE: Looks like it’s part of the University’s subscription to ProQuest – the same subscription that gets us the online journals and newspapers.
UPDATE: IP detection is preventing access from home… Must remember to load up with content while in the office… /sw/bin/wget -r anyone? 🙂
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UWO recently subscribed to Safari as well – I am equally impressed. What a great resource for libraries to provide, whether they be an academic library or not!
Gee D’Arcy, I wonder who on campus you could ask to see how to access from home… Maybe a LIBRARIAN?!? 😉 I’ll contact you off list with the particulars – we just brought this up and are working out an access issue before officially announcing to the public.
A librarian! Why didn’t I think of that? 😉 Thanks, Paul! I’m going to be using the hell out of this subscription!
Wow, that’s so cool. Wonder how much does this cost U of C for a campus licence. I have some co-worker using a personal licence, it’s very useful. The power is not for archiving, but query and referencing.
I was paying for my own subscription, too. I was actually just heading to the site to cancel it before I forgot (again), and noticed that I was automagically logged in as “University of Calgary”.
The most amazing thing is that every book is unlocked – so instead of just searching for a book, and deciding if it was worth the slot or 2 it requires, it’s already there waiting for me!
Hey D’Arcy,
You may want tocheck with your library — there could be proxy servers or other such things setup so that you can access from home. What if you came in through a VON client from home? Would that work? It would give you a U of C address…
Just thought I’d mention that…
Darn it… that should have been VPN. I should have taken typing at some point in my life….
Yup! They’ve just set up a proxy to let us access the subscription after authenticating as U of C library users. Awesome.
But yeah, my next step would have been using a VNC client to my desktop machine in my office. A bit like using a sledgehammer to drive a screw, though… 🙂 The proxy is much nicer.
Well, the proxy works! Looks like the proxy can timeout on long searches, but other than that it works quite well.
Looks like U of C does have a general VPN as well…
http://www.ucalgary.ca/it/computing/netserv/vpn/general.html…
Don’t see much for a MacOS at this point, but UBC has info on how we set up the VPN on the Mac: http://www.wireless.ubc.ca/vpn/macvpn.html.
I use a VPN from home all the time — its the only way to get to my Outlook server at UBC. I’ve wondered about the VPN side for the library, but have not done anything about it but wonder. Maybe I’ll look into that one tomorrow.
Michelle, thanks for digging around about VPN. It turns out there is VPN support built into MacOSX now – just open Internet Connect and configure the VPN. I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s good to know it’s there…