Several people have asked me to update them with my experiences using Athens. So here is a progress report (of sorts).

Athens has been extremely helpful setting up and coordinating access to my databases and journals. Athens is used extensively in the UK but is very new in the US. As a result some United States vendors are a little unsure of how to progress or if they can allow us to use Athens authentication. Athens has been very helpful by communicating to those vendors what they do and how they are used. For the most part each database vendor has been very helpful and willing to set up Athens access. All of my databases except for UpToDate has allowed Athens authentication.

Journals, ah well that is another beast (aren't they always). Some journals allow Athens authentication while some do not. I have asked our journal vendor to look into whether they can ask all of our ejournals about Athens authentication. After all if they (the journal vendor) is activating my institutional online access to the journals they might as well activate Athens. They are investigating to see if this is feasible. If it isn't then I must go to every online journal and ask them to activate our Athens authentication. We don't have a large online journal collection, but it is enough to be time consuming and keep me busy. We all know how responsive online journal publishers are. My favorite (sarcastic tone) is Wiley Interscience. They make it very difficult for you to contact them regarding your online access. You have to fill out a form, that in my experience has never worked. If you try and call them you get somebody in England, despite dialing a United States phone number. Nothing wrong with the folks in England, but it is more helpful to have somebody in the United States (during United States business hours) to answer my questions. For example: I still have yet to find out whether Wiley Interescience allows Basic Access License (BAL) institutions to make their journals available using Athens offsite authentication. The help webform returned an error and the lovely person in the UK was uncertain whether Athens would be allowed for BAL institutional users in the United States but she would forward my information to somebody in the United States office and they would return my call. Still waiting.

Basically if my journal vendor cannot help with Athens authentication to my subscribed titles, then it is going to take a while to get all of these little boogers up and running. My plan of action will be to do the most expensive and popular ones first, the easy ones second, and the difficult ones last.

My first plan of action was to get the resources into Athens. Now that is comming along and all that is left is the journals, my next step is to start registering my users. I haven't started that, once I do I will give you another progress report.