InCommon Library Services

> 2) Discussion of upcoming presentations
>
> I recently asked two of the eresource librarians here at Brown to 
> look at the archived video of Holly's presentation at the recent I2 
> Member Meeting. Both came back and said, basically, "this didn't 
> make the case -- this didn't convince us to deploy Shibboleth".
>
> I'd like to take some time during tomorrow's call to see if we can 
> explore the argument for using Shib, and see if we can improve the 
> argument. In particular, I'd be keenly interested in hearing 
> comments from the librarians in the group.

There's been a background discussion with David + Holly about what to 
present at the upcoming CNI meeting. (It was that thread that 
triggered this item in today's agenda.)

One of the points made during that discussion is that presenting Shib 
to librarians as an "access control solution" isn't going to get any 
traction -- because librarians don't see significant problems with 
the currently deployed solutions, and thus see no need to invest 
significant time in fixing something that's just not a problem. I'm 
in IT, so you shouldn't trust anything I say about this issue -- ;-) 
-- but its my sense (watching my daughter, a college junior, for 
instance) that the current solutions are problematic. But, seemingly, 
not enough of a problem....

That discussion mentioned a number of other reasons why librarians 
might want to consider deploying Shib(see below)  -- I'd like to use 
today's discussion, tho, to get a sense of what the librarians in 
this group feel are the important, relevant "selling points", that 
address the issues that are important to them.

-- consolidate the maintenance efforts (IP address, or whatever else 
is used to control access)

-- minimize he differences in the user experience (between on-campus 
and off-campus)

-- get campuses out of the business of managing IP addresses at (each 
of) the many vendors

-- provide Web SSO within a campus, or within a system (public higher 
ed statewide system, multiple campuses)

-- SSO-enabled proxy

-- support micro-licensing ( eg this resource is licensed for faculty 
of the med school, in a location independent way)

-- support step up authentication (eg on campus users would normally 
be authn'ed by IP address (as they are now); some resources, however, 
would require specific authorization, and thus a login). Possible 
with Shib 2.

-- e-resource providers provide personalization of their web sites 
via Shib delivered attributes (no one does this now; they haven't 
been asked....)

There was also the question of whether this group would be interested 
in working with librarians in some of the other Federations, on 
common issues (e-resource vendor site personalization).