I spent much of this past Sunday grumbling to my roommate about making the trek from our Upper East Side apartment to Greenwich Village in order to do research at Bobst. Having spent most of my morning expensively replacing a busted laptop, I was in no mood to go all the way downtown by the time I was up and running. “It’s not fair,” I whined, “that I have to be connected to the NYU network in order to access the databases I need.”
Apparently, others who came before me felt this way as well, which is why NYU has developed a proxy server. Available at http://www.nyu.edu/its/nyunet/proxy/, the server allows your personal Internet browser access to all of BobCat’s resources without having to be connected to NYU-NET. This is perfect for those of us in this class, who can benefit from having multiple archival databases at our fingertips.
At least, I thought so, as I quit whining and finished my Sunday research with a side of eggs and coffee.
Thanks for sharing this. I’ve had a lot of issues recently trying to access BobCat’s databases (ancestry library, archive finder, proquest, etc.). There is always an issue with connecting to another server which makes it difficult to get anything done. Sometimes I enjoy studying in Bobst, but for those days that you just can’t make it there, it’s great to be able to access all that Bobst has to offer wherever you are.
I’ve found that for some reason the Ancestry site via the proxy has issues. When you do more than a few searches, it seems like you get thrown out and treated like a non-subscriber. If you log back in through the proxy, access is restored, but it is one database I tend to use on campus more than off.
Interesting. I downloaded the proxy specifically for Ancestry and haven’t had an issue with it yet.