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accessible to the member institutions. The InfiStats uses “Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting

Initiative (SUSHI)” Protocol (ANSI/NISO Standard No. Z39.93-2007) that defines an automated request
and response model for harvesting of usage data for electronic resources using Web services
framework. The InfiStats portal imports the usage data from the publisher’s website automatically and
store it is a database on InfiStats platform. The InfiStats interface provides title-level COUNTER-

compliant reports to member institutions. The member institutions can also login to this portal for
monitoring the usage of their respective e-resources. Figure 24 depicts the home page of InfiStats
website.

Fig. 24: InfiStats Website

7.1.3.5. Off-Campus Access to e-Resources

While IP-based access is most convenient, safe and hassle-free authentication mechanism for
publishers as well as for subscribing institutions, it has its limitations. One of the most serious limitation
of IP-filtered access to e-resources is that the users can access e-resources only when they are on the

Institute campus. Ideally, an authorized user should be able to access e-resources irrespective of his / her
physical location at any time as long as he has access to the Internet.

In order to overcome this limitation, the INFLIBNET Access Management Federation (INFED) was set-
up which uses Shibboleth, a standard-based open source software, for authenticating authorized users
from colleges and universities and provide them seamless access to e-resources from anywhere,

anytime. Shibboleth offers a mechanism for users to access multiple resources within federated single
sign-on framework. The goal of the INFED is to allow users to access internal and external resources
seamlessly using a single, institutionally controlled identity. This would not only allow authorized users
to access e-resources from anywhere, anytime but would also circumvent the requirement of
maintaining multiple passwords for multiple resources in multiple domains. The INFED has already
made agreements with 9 publishers for this service. More publishers will be joining INFED in near future.

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