Managing access to electronic information: Progress and prospects

Managing access to electronic materials, especially where delivery is via a web interface, is surprisingly difficult to effect for large user populations. Traditional approaches, using IP address validation or username/password methods, are far from satisfactory. The Athens system developed for the UK academic community is, perhaps, the first successful demonstration that these problems can be overcome, with consequent gains both for suppliers and for the users and their institutional managers. A new generation of access management projects is just beginning to emerge and the review discusses how these are likely to influence the design of access management regimes in the near future.