Access From Off Campus
We provide a number of resources (databases, online journals, restricted course reserves, etc.) that may be accessed only by current University of West Florida (UWF) students, faculty and staff. If you are using a computer on campus you'll automatically be given full access to available resources.
If you wish to use these resources from off-campus, we must authenticate you as a valid user before connecting you to the service. We do this by asking you to login using valid Argonet or Nautilus Card credentials and then sending your traffic through an on-campus server.
If you access the internet via satellite broadband please read the information below!
We use an industry-standard piece of software called EZProxy to re-write parts of certain webpages so that we can make sure only UWF-affiliates have access to paid library resources (we’re actually required to do this as part of our agreements with vendors). Users of satellite broadband all over the world have reported various issues accessing library resources (this isn’t limited to UWF and it’s doesn’t appear to be linked to any one particular satellite broadband provider – see this Google search for examples http://goo.gl/FdgQvq). Sometimes this problem manifests itself as a page that will refuse to load or a page that loads incompletely or is “scrambled”. If you use satellite broadband and you’re experiencing problems accessing library resources you have two options:
- Disable web-acceleration/turbo-boost/caching for your connection. Depending on your provider you may be able to do this yourself via an online control panel or you may have to contact your provider directly. The staff at Kaplan University have put together a good page that goes into some detail - http://kaplan.libanswers.com/faq/36306
- Access the library resources via UWF’s eDesktop service. eDesktop is a virtual computer terminal that you can access via your computer (any work you do stays on the server and only screen updates are sent to your machine). The eDesktop server has direct access to our library resources so you shouldn’t have any issues accessing our resources. For more information about connecting to and using eDesktop visit this page http://uwf.edu/offices/help-desk/software/edesktop/