Extending secure access to library resources helps Auburn University further its core mission

04 July 2025 • Chloe Park, marketing officer

Auburn University actively supports lifelong learning for the wider Auburn community, as well as students, staff and alumni. Making sure each group has secure access to the right library resources is essential to the mission.

Auburn University is one of the largest universities in the American south, with around 30,000 students and 10,000 staff. Famed for its sports programs, it is also a center of academic excellence. It has three libraries with more than 7 million volumes, and has a multi-year program to put their resources online and support the university’s core mission:

To educate its students and prepare them for life

To drive the development of research and scholarship

To facilitate engagement and outreach

Making access to resources easy

Until 2024 the library managed authentication via a locally hosted proxy server. While patrons on campus didn’t need to sign in to search library systems, discovery journeys for people off-site often weren’t smooth.

Managers decided to upgrade authentication processes and remove barriers to knowledge by implementing OpenAthens Compass.

“Implementing OpenAthens Compass has helped us further each of the university’s three core goals."

Rebekah Lahue, Collections Assessment Librarian, Auburn University Libraries

Working with the expert team at OpenAthens, the migration happened without compromising library users’ access to resources.

A key part of the process was finding out what identifying data the university holds to identify users as members of its four patron groups:

Students, faculty and staff

Walk-ins from the wider community

Alumni

Community groups, notably the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project (APAEP)

This information on library users enables library staff to guide them to secure, seamless access to the resources they need.

Students, faculty and staff

Students, faculty and staff are by far the largest, most well-documented group. They use their institutional credentials to sign in to library systems just once. This allows them to access all relevant library resources without having to remember and enter multiple passwords as they browse. Single login, total access, endless possibilities.

The library is also gathering robust data on resource use by faculty, course, etc., to inform how they promote resources and manage subscriptions. (Personally identifying information is not captured in OpenAthens.) These tens of thousands of users have experienced a seamless transition.

"A lot of them didn’t notice the change. It was a ‘one and done’ thing” says Rebekah.

Walk-ins

Walk-ins are a small group that’s important to the university’s outreach mission, and they have use of a single machine within the library. They don’t need to log in. Using that machine puts all the appropriate resources at their fingertips.

Alumni

Improving the library’s services to alumni was an important part of the project. Previously, to use the library they needed their Alumni Association membership number; often, this made the process complicated and so uptake was low. Although the university often only holds each alumnus’s name, year of graduation and perhaps a current email address, this has been enough to get started with OpenAthens Compass.

Alumni aren’t using single sign-on. Instead, wherever possible, they’ve been emailed and invited to create personal accounts with a secure password. We notify Auburn when we find out email addresses are outdated or wrong so records can be updated. The library is controlling its alumni resource list easily with OpenAthens Compass permission sets.

Alumni are using the library in increasing numbers: more than 2,000 have created personal accounts so far.

APAEP

The APAEP program provides education opportunities for people living in Alabama’s prisons. This small group of library users has a more limited list of resources available to them, and using their APAEP credentials gives them the permissions they need to browse these easily.

The first dozen learners have recently graduated from the APAEP program. This demonstrates the value Auburn University brings to the wider community to achieve their mission to increase and enable engagement.

Lessons learned

The main piece of advice for other libraries, says libraries’ software developer Clint Bellanger, is to “pace yourselves”.

“Auburn has 150,000 alumni and we tried to do it all at once. It threw up too many questions, especially from older members of the association. Our advice is to break the project into more manageable batches.”

Clint Bellanger, senior software developer

They also advise: