Goldey-Beacom College’s library tools get “a big uptick in use” with OpenAthens Compass

27 June 2025 • Chloe Park, marketing officer

Staff in Goldey-Beacom College’s library took OpenAthens' word and asked us to help them ‘make knowledge easy’. Alongside the traditional books, journals and databases, access to many non-traditional library resources like Zoom and Grammarly is managed as part of their OpenAthens Compass implementation.

Goldey-Beacom College has 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students studying programs including psychology, criminal justice, English, economics and business. It is located in Wilmington, Delaware, USA.

Security concerns

The college library began to test OpenAthens in 2014 to resolve issues over security and problems with resource discovery.

Until then, responsibility for authentication college-wide rested with IT and students and staff accessed library systems with usernames and passwords. Credential-sharing was a known issue and password resets were often needed. Discovery journeys were often far from smooth.

“Outsourcing authentication to OpenAthens streamlined access to resources and it has been a godsend for that,” says Russell Michalak, director of library and archives at the college.

“It has also helped us with outreach, for example to our alumni who can use the library easily.”

Managing non-traditional library resources

Uptake of library resources increased significantly among all user groups simply because the OpenAthens implementation removed friction. The library was no longer the college IT department’s most frequent customer because technical support is a phone call away via the OpenAthens service desk. It seemed an obvious step, then, to integrate more resources into OpenAthens to keep them running seamlessly.

Tools and resources provided by the college include Panopto for lecture capture, AI presentation creation tool Prezi, writing assistant Grammarly, essential news sites such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, videoconferencing platform Zoom and numerous local news media.

These (and many more) have been integrated into OpenAthens in processes overseen and supported by OpenAthens and EBSCO Information Services. Day-to-day maintenance is managed easily by library staff.

“Now we have one authentication system for it all, and it’s been wonderful. “It’s secure and many of the tools we offer have had a big uptick in usage since we integrated them into OpenAthens.”

Russell Michalak, director of library and archives, Goldey-Beacom College

Ongoing maintenance and responsive tech support

Library staff are saving time they once spent on maintenance and troubleshooting because OpenAthens manages access to resources as students and staff join and leave the college. The team behind their Compass product makes sure certificates are kept up to date for SAML resources. And technical support is available almost 24/7.

For example, when Zoom went down during an important online research symposium EBSCO and OpenAthens restored connectivity within 30 minutes.

OpenAthens Compass also offers powerful usage analytics. The library uses these to focus marketing activities: under-used, quality resources get a promotional push to help students do better work.

Measurable benefits

Managing non-traditional library resources centrally in the library has brought Goldey-Beacom College big benefits, says Russell Michalak. And in a talk at Access Lab 2025 he quantified them: