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Access to certain electronic resources (databases and websites) may be restricted to the Purdue University community (currently enrolled students, faculty and staff) due to licensing and copyright agreements with vendors and publishers.
If you are using a computer on campus that is connected to the Purdue campus network, you will be connected automatically to library electronic resources; no log-in is required. Campus computers are granted automatic access to library electronic resources because they have a Purdue IP address.
In order to access our resources from off-campus, you will need to sign-in to the libraries EZProxy server. The method you use to sign-in will vary based upon the type of resource you are trying to access.
BoilerKey: When accessing library electronic resources off-campus, you will be asked to use BoilerKey. If you have issues with your BoilerKey, please contact ITaP for assistance (itap@purdue.edu or (765) 494-4000) or refer to this page for more information.
The surest option (especially for phone or tablet browsers) is to link to electronic resources directly from Library Search or other Purdue Libraries web pages.
Due to the split tunnel nature of the VPN, you will still need to use the libraries links to access electronic resources when connecting through the campus VPN. Please use the methods outlined in the section below to access electronic resources off-campus. Note: You may have to disconnect your VPN if you are experiencing difficulties accessing electronic resources when off campus. This should be a rare occurence and only necessary when the split tunnel VPN might be conflicting with the proxy server. Please contact the Libraries eResources support if you have further questions.
When you’re not using the Purdue network to connect to the Internet (e.g., you’re off-campus or using a different network for other reasons), you must access our electronic resources through a proxy server in order to identify your Purdue affiliation.
EZproxy is a service that identifies you as a Purdue user to electronic resource providers when you are outside the Purdue network.
You must use EZproxy from areas outside the Purdue network, including:
The surest option (especially for phone or tablet browsers) is to link to electronic resources directly from Library Search or other Purdue Libraries web pages. These links automatically go through the proxy server.
You can manually change the web address (URL) of an electronic resource web page to route it through the proxy server. Prepend the the following proxy server prefix to the electronic resource web address:
https://login.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/login?url= (e.g., https://login.ezproxy.lib.purdue.edu/login?url=http://www.nature.com)
You can also add the Purdue Libraries Bookmarklet to your browser to append the EZproxy prefix using a browser shortcut.
When a provider's site wants to set one or more cookies and you're accessing through EZProxy, the proxy server makes one cookie to hold all of the required data. When you go to a different provider that cookie also contains the new provider's data. Eventually, if you visit enough different sites, the cookie EZProxy is using will grow larger than the max allowed size, so new data cannot be added to that cookie. For many providers, you'll then see weird server errors, because they expect to be able to write and read to their cookies, but on your browser, it's just that now-oversized cookie that can't accept any more data. So clearing your cookies resets it back to zero, ready to start accepting new data again.