Washington and Lee University

Washington and Lee University

Off-Campus Database Access

W&L students, faculty, and staff can use our subscription databases from off-campus locations, from just about anywhere in the world. However, you MUST enter the database, such as JSTOR, through the library Web site.
You cannot take any short-cuts, such as going straight to www.jstor.org.

When you first attempt to get into a database through our Web site, you will be prompted to enter your network ID and password. Once you do that, the proxy server will recognize you as a member of the W&L community.

The most common road-block to this procedure is that sometimes, a student or faculty member in an off-campus location, may be using a computer which is within another institutional or corporate network that is "protected" by a firewall. When that happens, it can be impossible to get around that firewall to identify your affiliation with W&L.

Occasionally some off-campus W&L researchers are not prompted for a network password as they attempt to connect to one of our databases. When that happens, one solution which might work is this:

  • Go to the proxy server login page
  • Use the standard login for the campus network to log in
  • After you log in, you will be greeted by a long list of databases
  • Go to http://library.wlu.edu/ and navigate to the desired database

You should now be able to access any database that will work with our proxy server. If you cannot, then the problem probably is a security setting on the computer or the network you are using. If the above steps do not take care of an access problem, please contact one of our Reference Librarians.