InCommon Library Services

Renee Shuey wrote:
> No, but here is the one from Penn State.
>
> The Penn State pilot team met a week ago to assess the hurdles/issues 
> identified by Cliff and Peter and determine which of these were issues 
> for our university as well as develop a project plan.
>
>    * The major obstacle to use of Shib in Penn State Libraries is that
>      it is not a comprehensive solution; only a small percentage of
>      vendors of licensed resources are Shib-enabled (including
>      Elsevier, JSTOR and Ebsco) while hundreds are not,  and the
>      majority of these vendors continue to use IP filtering for access
>      management. Thus, in addition to Shibboleth, University Libraries
>      would need to support other authentication solutions for access to
>      licensed resources. One issue that needs exploring is whether
>      Shibboleth is therefore worth the implementation and support
>      effort. In addition, we will be considering how vendors might be
>      encouraged to become Shib-enabled and how research libraries might
>      collectively work towards that goal through joint licensing
>      agreements with consortia such as the CIC or through federations
>      such as InCommon.
When I talk to the librarians here at brown, they usually mention that 
they do a bi-annual user satisfaction survey. For the last several 
cycles, off-campus access to licensed  resources has always  ranked as 
the library service that users have the most problems with. We offer 
both a proxy and VPN access. Both seem to have a variety of troubling 
quirks, and the dissatisfaction level is high.

The librarians here feel that, altho we have hundreds of licenses in 
place, that 15 vendors account for approximately 90% of the traffic. And 
they think that while (relatively speaking)  only a small number of 
vendors are currently shib-enabled... that getting those 15 vendors 
shib-enabled would significantly reduce user dissatisfaction, and 
significantly reduce the number of calls to the help desk and trouble 
tickets.

Key to this,of course, is ensuring a consistent coherent user 
experience, when vendors are using a mixture of authz mechanisms.

Is anyone else having a similar problem?