Purpose
This page describes how to configure access to ProQuest in Circulation Manager.
Prerequisites
- Ensure that the organisation that wants to use ProQuest as a vendor can authenticate its patrons using SAML.
- Ensure that the organisation's IdP can send back to Circulation Manager a unique patron ID as a SAML attribute.
- Ensure that you have machines with static IP addresses that ProQuest can whitelist.
Configuring Circulation Manager
Configuration settings
The table below contains a description of different ProQuest integration's configuration settings:
| Parameter | Mandatory | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data source name | Yes | ProQuest | The name of the Circulation Manager's data source used to store information about ProQuest books. |
| BooksCatalog Service's URL | Yes | The URL of BooksCatalog service used to download the ProQuest OPDS 2.0 feed and described on ProQuest API page. | |
| PartnerAuthToken Service's URL | Yes | The URL of PartnerAuthToken service used to create a ProQuest JWT bearer token required to authenticate in other ProQuest services. and described on ProQuest API page | |
| DownloadLink Service's URL | Yes | The URL of DownloadLink service used to download ProQuest books and described on ProQuest API page. | |
| ProQuest JWT token's expiration timeout | No | 3600 | Determines how long in seconds can a ProQuest JWT token be valid. |
| List of SAML attributes containing an affiliation ID | No | eduPersonPrincipalName, eduPersonScopedAffiliation | ProQuest integration assumes that the SAML provider is used for authentication. ProQuest JWT bearer tokens required by the most ProQuest API services are created based on the affiliation ID - SAML attribute uniquely identifying the patron.This setting determines what attributes the ProQuest integration will use to look for affiliation IDs. The ProQuest integration will investigate the specified attributes sequentially and will take the first non-empty value. |
| Test SAML affiliation ID | No | 1 | This configuration setting is really useful for testing ProQuest API without setting up a SAML authentication provider. Please contact ProQuest before using it. |
| Default audience | No | If ProQuest does not specify the target audience for their books, assume the books have this target audience. | |
| Feed page's size | No | 5,000 | This value determines how many publications will be on a single page fetched from the BooksCatalog service. Please note that this value also affects how many publications will be committed in a single database transaction by Circulation Manager. Making this value too big may lead to different database issues. |
| HTTP proxy's URL | No | URL of the proxy handling HTTP traffic. Proxies can be used for testing when trying to access ProQuest API from machines having non-whitelisted IP addresses. Please find more information below. | |
| HTTPS proxy's URL | No | URL of the proxy handling HTTPS traffic. Proxies can be used for testing when trying to access ProQuest API from machines having non-whitelisted IP addresses. Please find more information below. |
Proxies
As it was mentioned above it might be useful to use a proxy to test the SAML integration from the local machine which has an IP address non whitelisted by ProQuest. To do so you need to use a SOCKS proxy:
ssh -D 8888 -f -C -q -N <FQDN or IP address of the machine with a whitelisted IP address>
After you activated a SOCKS proxy, you'll need to create an HTTP proxy based on it:
npm install -g http-proxy-to-socks hpts -s 127.0.0.1:8888 -p 8080
After this, you can use the following values for proxy settings:
- HTTP proxy's URL = http://localhost:8080
- HTTPS proxy's URL = https://localhost:8080
Depending on your system configuration you might face a weird SSL: WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER error. In this case you can try to use a SOCKS proxy:
- HTTPS proxy's URL = socks5://localhost:8888
Creating a ProQuest collection in Circulation Manager
- Create a new collection with ProQuest protocol.
- Set up all the mandatory configuration settings mentioned in the table above:
- Set up optional configuration settings if required:
ProQuest Import Monitor
Please note that the import of ProQuest collections is done on a scheduled basis, the same way it's done for OPDS 1.x/OPDS 2.x collections.
However, the ProQuest import process is a very computationally expensive operation due to the inefficient ProQuest feed's internal structure and proquest_import_monitor is set up to run only twice a week:
- Monday 2 AM EST (11 PM PST).
- Thursday 2 AM EST (11 PM PST). This run uses an additional --process-removals flag which forces proquest_import_monitor to remove from Circulation Manager's catalog items that are no longer present in the ProQuest feed (it's not enabled by default).
The schedule above is subject to change.
