Athens is an Access Management system for controlling secure access to web based resources. Many libraries use it to provide secure off site access to their web resources. Athens was developed in the UK and has become a popular amoung many education and health instituions in that country.

It was Patti Reynolds recommendation on MEDLIB-L about Athens that drew my curiosity. Reynolds, the Director of Bishopric Medical Library at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Florida, said, "The Athens format is easy to use, the staff are great to work with, the convenience is just amazing. I finally feel that I have some control over our users and usage. She continued to say that she has had "nothing but rave reviews from our doctors who absolutely love the service."

For many academic libraries, users are usually able to get remote access to the campus network and use many of the library's resources and services. However, many American hospitals do not allow remote access to their intranet or network. Hospital libraries could have a wealth of resources available on the intranet for their users, but since the intranet is inaccessible from outside the hospital, many of those resources are more difficult or impossible to acces. Some resources may be available through user names and passwords, but usually there are multiple passwords for the various databases, leaving patrons to either remember all the various user names and passwords or travel with a cheat sheet listing them. With Athens access users only have to remember one user name and password....their own, the one they created.

As I said this could be quite help for hospital libraries trying to improve off site access to their resources. For more information check out Athen's FAQ