Authentication & Access

IP Authentication

ACM uses an organization’s outward facing IP addresses as a means to identify users coming from a subscribing institution and in turn authenticate access to the ACM Digital Library. Using IP authentication allows ACM to offer access to the Digital Library for everyone belonging to an organization without need of usernames/password.

Proxy Servers and EzProxy

Many libraries use proxy servers as a tool to help authenticate offsite users who are unable to be authenticated by an institution’s IP address. ACM allows libraries to include the IPs addresses for their proxy servers, including OCLC’s EZproxy tool, to be included in the list of their outward facing IP addresses.

To use EZproxy to give remote users access to the ACM Digital Library, https://dl.acm.org, you will need to configure EZproxy to run with an SSL Certificate. Documentation on this process can be found on the EZproxy support site https://www.oclc.org/support/services/ezproxy/documentation/cfg/ssl.en.html.

In addition, ACM can handle the “X-Forwarded-For” http header field when a library shares a proxy server with another group that does not license the DL or when the Proxy IP address cannot be predicted.

Sample EzProxy Configuration:
Option X-Forwarded-For
T ACM Digital Library
U https://dl.acm.org
DJ dl.acm.org

Shibboleth

Shibboleth (http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/about.html) is an open source software package that allows an individual to use a single username/login to access multiple online resources which are subscribed to by their institution. Currently, ACM supports Shibboleth authentication so users can login to the ACM Digital Library directly using their Shibboleth credentials.

Librarians interested in gaining access via Shibboleth for their institution need to provide following information to [email protected]:

The federation your institution belongs to
The institution Entity ID
List any scope affiliation

Search Engines Indexing the DL

ACM proactively works with the search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! to ensure that all of ACM’s publications, including the full text of articles, are indexed by these services. This allows users to use these search engines to discover key words included in ACM’s publications. So a user of Google Scholar can run a search for computer science and find the results in the full text of an ACM publication and in turn have the option of being redirected to the full text of the article within the Digital Library. ACM allows the DL to be indexed by other approved internet search engines and federated search engines.

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