Off-campus access to Brooklyn Law School Library databases is achieved through the use of a proxy server, which channels your requests to connect to these sites. The proxy server makes sure that you are a registered library borrower, and then connects you to the specified sites.
According to Victoria Szymczak, Brooklyn Law School Library (BLS) Director, “Many of our databases require the use of a proxy server for off-campus access. Information sent through a proxy server takes slightly longer to reach you because it must pass through more “hops” to get to you.”
Safari on the Mac and Internet Explorer on Windows both are capable of being configured as proxy servers. “However, using the O/S provider’s “native” browser has an unfortunate side effect: all network traffic, not just traffic between your browser and the research database, then passes through the proxy server. This slows all of your traffic down slightly,” says Phil Allred, BLS Director of Information Technology (IT).
Because of this, Brooklyn Law School IT recommends BLS community download and install an alternate browser dedicated solely to proxy server use — Firefox. This allows all of your remaining traffic to remain speedy, only subjecting certain database requests to proxy service.
Follow these instructions to configure Firefox to the proxy server. It is to follow similar steps on other browsers and get the same performance benefit, as long as the other browser isn’t the “native” browser on that machine.
If you have any problems, please contact BLS IT Support- support@brooklaw.edu
