InCommon Library Services

[Dean Woodbeck <>]

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InCommon Library Services Working Group
Draft Minutes
January 25, 2008
 
Steven Carmody, Brown University (chair)
Lynn Garrison, Penn State University
Adam Chandler, Cornell University
Tod Olson, University of Chicago
Tom Barton, University of Chicago
R.L. “Bob” Morgan, University of Washington
Declan Fleming, University of California-San Diego
Gabe Lawrence, University of California-San Diego
Holly Eggleston, University of California-San Diego
Claire Mizumoto, University of California-San Diego
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)
 
**Potential Working Group Member**
 
Alan Darnell, of the University of Guelph, has expressed an interest in joining this group. He is involved with an organization developing a Canadian federation. Steven Carmody will contact him.
 
** Review from ALA**
 
Holly Eggleston made a presentation on the use of Shibboleth in the library services area. She believes the presentation helped get the topic on peoples’ radar. The presentation was late in the day and there was not much discussion at the end.
 
One question that came up was Shib’s logging capabilities, particularly compared to that of a proxy. There was also a question about whether Shib validates with the IdP for each resource that is accessed during a session.
 
Steven said that the answer to the validation question is that Shib will always go back to the IdP and authenticate when a user accesses a different resource. In addition, Shib will log all of those transactions. When using Shibboleth, enough information is logged so an IdP can determine who the user is and develop demographic summaries. The trade-off is that, once a user is at a resource, the Shib logs are not as detailed as those of a proxy.
 
There was a general discussion about how much of the log information is of interest, particularly information about where users are going within a vendor’s web site. That is of interest, but that information is also available from the vendor.
 
**OCLC and EZProxy**
 
There was a general discussion about the announcement made at ALA that OCLC is purchasing EZProxy. In general, it seems that OCLC has an altruistic reason for this – helping to develop a product that has shown its value, but is currently supported by just one person. They also have hired Chris Zagar for a year to help them think through questions about their services and how EZProxy will help them develop their services to academic and public libraries.
 
OCLC is also looking to expand the content of WorldCat to include metadata about journal articles. If you do a search and find a matching article, you could be taken to the local link resolver.
 
There was a general discussion about conversations between Internet2, the Shib team and OCLC about Shibboleth and InCommon. So far, nothing has turned into action. Steve mentioned that, being on the verge of the next major release of Shib, it may make sense to go back to OCLC and renew the conversations. The most effective approach would be two-fold – members of the Shib teams discussing frameworks and possibilities, and librarians pushing for  the services that would be made possible by Shib and OCLC’s membership in the federation.
 
**Current Projects of Interest**
 
Penn State is about to being testing a Shib-enabled proxy server and direct Shib access to a couple of resources. Testing should begin in early March.
 
UCSD has EZProxy and Shib both up and has been testing on a small set of resources. Larger scale testing will begin this month.
 
Cornell switched to a Shib-enabled LDAP last week. There are no plans to do much with Shibboleth and EZProxy until it becomes more clear what the OCLC purchase of EZProxy will mean.
 
Chicago continues to work with RefWorks.
 
**News from Europe**
 
There is an email list of librarians starting up in the U.K. with the intent of looking at the same sorts of issues as this working group. They will be using a single Shibboleth/Athens gateway to access resources that operate at a national level. However, many of the same questions related to EZProxy and link resolvers will be discussed. Steven will send a URL for the list.
 
Steven contacted a group of librarians in Europe who are working on similar issues as this working group. There is some interest in extending an invitation to our members to join their discussions. Steven believes this traffic will pick up once Shib 2.0 is released.
 
**Which Vendors are Your Priority**
 
Working group members are asked to develop a list of the top 10-15 vendors, in some ranked order, that would be a priority for their university. Once a priority list is developed, it could be matched against a list of those that are Shib-enabled and those that are not. This would provide a priority list of vendors to approach about Shibboleth and the federation.
 
The discussion led to a number of potential vendors, including Springer (which has just signed a contract in Germany agreeing to implement Shib by a certain date).
 
OCLC, Elsevier, EBSCO, JStor, Thomson-Gale and RefWorks are all members of InCommon. The American Chemical Society and CSA are Shib-enabled but not members of InCommon.
 
**Next call – Friday, February 8, 1:00 p.m. (EST)**