LTS Newsletter: Summer 2026

Welcome to Library Technology Service’s occasional newsletter for anyone interested in Harvard Library IT.

Summer Edition

As we say our good-byes to EZproxy, LTS reflects back on this invisible bridge that quietly turned “in the library” into “anywhere in the world” and powered decades of access to electronic resources.

A Brief and Slightly Embellished History of EZproxy

In the beginning, there was chaos.

Well, not actual chaos. There were journals, databases, and libraries. But there was also a deeply confusing distinction between being "in a library" and "not in a library," a concept that somehow became one of the defining philosophical questions of higher education.

In the 1990s, libraries faced a growing dilemma. Publishers were happily selling electronic resources, but they expected users to access them from approved campus networks. This IP based authentication worked beautifully for anyone physically sitting in the library; it worked less beautifully for faculty working from home, students in dorms, researchers traveling abroad, and anyone who dared to use library resources from somewhere other than a library building.

Enter EZproxy.

Created by librarian and software developer Chris Zagar, EZproxy arrived with a simple promise: "What if we just convince the publisher that the user is on campus?"

This was, in technical terms, a proxy server.

In practical terms, it was a highly respectable digital disguise.

A student sitting in pajamas three states away could click a library link, pass through EZproxy, and suddenly appear to a publisher's website as if they were peacefully studying in the university library at 2:00 AM.

No more need to track user names and passwords for hundreds of resources.

Librarians rejoiced.

Faculty and students rejoiced.

For years, EZproxy became one of the most beloved invisible technologies in libraries. Few users knew it existed. Even fewer understood it. Most only noticed it when something went wrong.

As electronic collections expanded, EZproxy expanded with them. New databases appeared. Publishers merged, split, renamed themselves, merged again, and changed their URLs for reasons known only to corporate strategists and caffeinated web administrators.

Meanwhile, in order to keep EZproxy working flawlessly with these new and newly changed resources, library staff maintained thousands of lines of configuration files containing mysterious stanzas that looked less like library work and more like instructions for summoning ancient spirits.

Yet somehow, it all worked.

By the 2000s and 2010s, EZproxy had become a fixture of academic life. Millions of researchers accessed articles through it every day without realizing that a humble piece of library infrastructure was quietly standing between them and a very expensive paywall. By hiding the complexity of the system, libraries were able to provide a higher level of service.

In the beginning, Chris Zagar saw EZproxy as a bridge solution for an immediate problem. It took more than 20 years, but technology finally progressed enough so that libraries could move to a system that stayed invisible to users and didn’t rely on IP based authentication: federated authentication, single sign-on systems, and an ever-growing alphabet soup of access technologies. New tools arrived. Security requirements increased. User expectations rose.

Today, EZproxy occupies a special place in library history: flying under the radar, not flashy enough for keynote speeches, quietly earning an award from LITA in 2006, EZproxy was absolutely essential to the functioning of modern academic research for decades.

Harvard Use of EZproxy

EZproxy came onto the local scene at the same time that Harvard started a centralized authentication service, in the form of Harvard University IDs and PIN. LTS, then called the Office for Information Systems, became one of the first users of the new University ID and PIN authentication system. The HarvardKey gateway for EZproxy (and now OpenAthens) is the most used at the university.

Like a stagehand in a theater production, EZproxy rarely receives applause. Yet if it disappeared for a day prior to the migration to OpenAthens, every librarian on campus would have suddenly become the most “popular” person in the room.

Special thanks to Laura Morse and Paul Aloisio for sharing this reflection.