InCommon Library Services

I've had to cancel the last couple of calls; unfortunately, I'm not 
going to be available for any of the calls scheduled through the end 
of March. I'm involved in an IT strategic planning effort here at 
Brown, and I'm scheduled every friday from noon till 2 pm edt, thru 
the end of march. I didn't realize at the outset that this would 
become a weekly gathering. I'm very sorry for the disruption this has 
caused to our joint effort.

There was a call scheduled for tomorrow, friday, march 7. I've asked 
several other people if they'd be available to run the call; 
unfortunately, none of them are available. (This is probably my own 
fault, as people may have come to expect that I will cancel the 
calls... ).

However, Holly Eggleston from UCSD has agreed to take on the co-chair 
role of this group, and will be leading the call scheduled for march 
21. During the interim, she may be using email to poll people as to 
the status of their various pilot projects.

My sense is that there are several possible next steps:

-- the campuses continue with their testing of the various software 
packages and approaches that we've discussed
-- take our currently developed information to a public place on the 
wiki (will undoubtedly require repackaging some of the information)
-- possibly write an article for a journal like dlib
-- other tasks?

A couple of other items:

-- Bill Jordan, from the Univ of Washington library, has joined this 
group. Welcome, Bill!

-- we are likely to continue to see information providers joining 
InCommon over the coming months. The UK and German Federations have 
been pressuring (hmmm... "forcing" might be a better word for what 
they're doing) these providers to add support for Shibboleth, and 
they've been quite successful. We should be able to piggyback on 
their efforts.

Once again, let me apologize for how my recent scheduling has 
disrupted our work. And Holly will see on the phone, on the 21st!