InCommon Library Services

["Dean Woodbeck" <>]

Here are the draft minutes from the first InCommon Library Services working group phone call. Please send any comments/corrections to 

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InCommon Library Services Working Group
Draft Minutes
April 19, 2007

Steven Carmody, Brown University (chair)
Joy Veronneau, Cornell University
Adam Chandler, Cornell University
Dave Kennedy, University of Maryland
Renee Shuey,  Penn State University
Lynn Garrison, Penn State University
Tod Olson, University of Chicago
Tom Barton, University of Chicago
Gabriel Lawrence, Univ. of California, San Diego
Holley Eggleston, Univ. of California, San Diego
Luc Declerck , Univ. of California, San Diego
Harold Colson, Univ. of California, San Diego
Renee Frost, Internet2
Michael Gettes, Internet2
Steve Olshansky, Internet2
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)

**Action Items**

[AI] All -- Look at the list of European federation vendors (URL sent by Steve Carmody) to see if any of those are on your priority list. 

[AI] Steve Carmody will send out wiki URL and instructions for use. 

[AI] Tom and Tod from Chicago will prepare a summary of their approach and experience using EasyProxy in combination with Shibboleth. This will also be posted on the wiki.

[AI] Adam from Cornell will keep a log of his experience as they implement EasyProxy and Shib. 

[AI] Dave from Maryland will prepare a summary of his experience with EasyProxy/Shib.

**Working Group Overview**

Steve Carmody provided an overview of the purpose for this working group and the conference calls – to encourage the use of InCommong and Shibboleth within the library community. He pointed out that regularly scheduled phone calls are useful for creating deadlines for deliverables. The first step will be to identify the issues associated with the use of Shib and federations in the community.

The working group consensus is for a bi-weekly call.

There is a Shibboleth camp the last week of June, 2007, which would be a good target point to have a list of issues outlined and a list of potential approaches defined. The tentative deadline is to have something to report back to the larger community by the end of the summer.

Part of this process will be looking at how to overcome a decade worth of business practices that exist on campuses, including custom technical architectures and ingrained user experiences. We will need to identify the value propositions to use in asking people to change the way they have done things.  

Four campuses have been involved in preliminary discussions and have started to develop a list of issues, which seem to be divided between technical concerns and policies and practices. The concept here is to deal with the technical issues via the email list and discuss the policy and practice concerns on these phone calls and via a wiki. 

**Leveraging Vendor Interaction**

An example falling in the latter category is trying to define which library vendors are Shib-enabled. Steve has provided a list of European vendors at this URL and distributed the password: 

http://stc.cis.brown.edu/~stc/Projects/Projects-using-Shib/License_Group/Vendor-status.html

He asked that everyone look at the list and see if any of their priority vendors are there. There was also a discussion about identifying contacts within each of these companies. 

The working group also discussed ways to leverage interactions with a vendor. While the European federations have sheer numbers on their side, efforts in the U.S. are more decentralized. InCommon is beginning to fill that void. 

This working group can help overcome the lack of sheer numbers by providing leadership within the community. Targeting vendors with high volume sales within the university community, for example, would be a start. Other approaches would include:

•	Developing creditable use-cases to encourage participation in the federation
•	Writing articles in appropriate journals
•	Making presentations at appropriate meetings and conferences
•	Identifying vendors that pride themselves in community leadership (Elsevier is an example) and recruit their participation in this effort
•	Identify potential roadblocks and develop value propositions for those areas. 

In many cases, a relatively small number of vendors account for a high percentage of use. So, the sheer number of Shib-enabled vendors is less important than getting the right vendors on to use Shib. There is a chicken-and-egg problem – more Shib-enabled vendors should result in more Shib-enabled libraries and more Shib-enabled libraries would provide more value to the vendors. So, we need to leverage both sides. 

**Authentication--Mixed Environment**

There was a discussion about maintaining a mixed environment for authentication and authorization. In general, the working group felt that there would always be a mixed environment – that it is a reality today and will probably continue. That shouldn't be a deal-breaker, in terms of implementing Shib.

Reports from Cornell, Chicago, UCSD, Maryland and Penn State all confirmed operating in a mixed environment with at least two methods for authentication.

There was also discussion about the use of EasyProxy. Chicago is looking at Shibbolizing EastyProxy. Tod will develop an informal paper describing the experience with EasyProxy and URL rewriting.  Cornell is working on an implementation now and Adam will keep a log of their experience. Maryland has done a lot of mapping of people into groups in EasyProxy. All of these items will be good information to place in the wiki. Steve will send out a URL for the wiki and provide instructions for its use.

Andrea reported on a project just starting at Cornell to provide common authentication and authorization between the main Ithaca campus and the medical college in New York City. 
Tom commented that he sees the value proposition rising, with campuses discussing the need for both internal SSO and external, particularly if an increasing amount of granular control is needed.

Articulating these value propositions and value-added arguments, then placing them on the wiki, would be helpful. 

Another library issue that shows up consistently is accommodating walk-up patrons. Just by being present in the library, they have access to some licensed electronic resources. Some libraries use kiosks for database access, while others use IDs and passwords that change daily. At the same time, campus-based users have a need to log in and use resources that they can access, but outside patrons cannot.

**Next phone call** is Friday, May 4, at 12:30 p.m. (EDT)