InCommon Library Services

The UK Federation will be having a conversation with Thomson ISI 
later this week; I've relayed to them some of our recent 
conversations (particularly the request that Thomson include the 
/Login sessionInitiator in their config).

As part of that conversation, Fiona asked some questions about the 
OpenURL/sfx/EZProxy/sessionInitiator flow that we've explored. In 
particular, she's asking about the role of EZP, and two of the steps 
we have it doing (determining whether the target site is shib-enabled 
or not; rewriting the url to  point to the sessionInitiator). She's 
wondering whether the link resolver could also perform both of these 
functions...?

I'm no expert on link resolvers... but many of you are.... would her 
suggestion be viable?

Thanks!

> From: "Fiona Culloch" <>
> To: <>
> Cc: <>, "Ian Young" <>
> Subject: RE: common set of attributes across federations
> Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 14:20:58 +0100
>  >
> >  Are you familiar with EZP's Shib support?
>
> I'm not I'm afraid: as I mentioned previously, I haven't seen much
> sign of it at all yet, though I'm sure some places here must be using it.
>
> However, I had a question about the scenario descriptions in your
> previous mail.  Previously, my understanding was that the job of
> a campus OpenURL resolver was to do precisely the kind of things
> that in your scenarios you describe EZP as doing: mapping a single
> static URL that references a document into the appropriate form
> for local use, including any necessary authentication bells and whistles,
> accommodating on/off-campus access, etc.
>
> Can you explain (or link to) what it is EZP can do that the OpenURL
> resolver couldn't if it was appropriately configured?  I can easily
> imagine that in a particular setting the people responsible for
> configuring an OpenURL resolver can't or don't want to reconfigure it
> to accommodate Shibboleth, but are happy to delegate that work
> to a different group who maintain an EZP instance.  But is there a
> technical reason that an OpenURL resolver isn't flexible enough to
> do similar things itself?
>
> Fiona.