In November a call for participation was posted to several mailing lists for a survey on web proxy use in libraries. A report based on survey responses is now available.
Seventy-four responses came in from the survey. By far, the most popular use of proxy servers in libraries is for remote resource access. The turn-key solution EZproxy was the most popular, followed by Innovative's Web Access Management product and the freely available Squid and Apache proxy servers.
Proxies for filtering and proxies for bandwidth conservation are equally popular reasons in libraries. Microsoft Proxy server is a popular package for these uses, but a wide variety of software packages are in use. Proxy servers are also being used to gather statistics on resource use.
The report has numerous anecdotes and information from specific libraries, including URLs to user documentation, description of systems, and software packages.
Thanks to everyone who participated!
Interested in adding your own library's experiences to the report? You can still take the survey; I'll periodically recompile the responses and update the report.