Current Situation
All staff and students have a unique Athens account (which is referred to as your classic Athens account). The initial password and Athens account name would have been emailed to you in the first few days of joining the University and would look like ‘suraa012324’. To gain access to any Athens protected web site you currently authenticate (prove who you are) by entering your classic Athens account name and password at an Athens login prompt before the web site will allow you to view the desired content.

Future
During the summer the Library and IT Services are planning to introduce a ‘local authentication’ system to work with the Athens protection mechanism. The new system is known as AthensDA (Athens Devolved Authentication).

What this means is that to gain access to Athens protected resources you would still need to ‘login to Athens’, but by entering your University computing account name and password instead of the classic Athens account details. Therefore AthensDA alleviates the need for separate Athens account names and passwords to be created and remembered. AthensDA will be available On-Campus and Off-Campus.

When
We are currently testing AthensDA, and if this goes well, it is planned to introduce the new system during the end of July and beginning of August.

You will still be able to use your classic Athens account during a short change-over period, but this will expire during Semester 1 of the next academic year, so we will encourage people to switch over as soon as possible.

More information and instructions will be sent out a few weeks prior to the AthensDA launch date – so please keep an eye on your university e-mail account, and the Library web page over the summer.