Accessing University’s Library Journal Databases from Home: Internet Application

Abstract

Introduction: Bibliographical documentation is an essential part of quality research. For researchers the most important source of information is the scientific literature databases that their university’s library has access through Internet. Some of these libraries have access to this databases based on the university’s IP. In these cases researchers can’t access them from their homes where an important part of research is carried away. Aim: to realize a cheap, user friendly system to help researchers access through Internet from their homes the journal databases of their university’s libraries when access to this databases is based on IP, that consists of an internet access page to resources, a database of users to access the resources, database backup and restore facilities, and a system log to identify fraudulent access. Materials and Methods: A university server with free software was used to host the system: operating system Linux Debian, an Apache HTTP server with OpenSSL and PHP modules, a MySQL database. The code for the system was written in PHP, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, MySQL with mcedit and tested for functionality in Firefox and Internet Explorer and for workload with htop. Results: The paper describes the system functionality: access to the system, main user page, browsing library’s databases, administrator’s page, adding and editing user’s and unit’s profiles, backup and restore for the database, logging. The workload on the server is small.