InCommon Library Services

["Eggleston, Holly" <>]

Hi all –

 

Just wanted to give a quick summary of the recent presentation at NASIG – the presentation room was packed, and both vendors and institutions were expressing substantial interest in both the shib-only and hybrid scenarios – given the feedback, the presentation provided a good introduction for librarians for understanding what Shibboleth is, and why the hybrid environment and shib-enabled resources would be useful for them.

 

In an informal survey of the room, nearly all libraries were using EZProxy, which also helped with the relevancy / “ease of implementation” discussion, and also provided an opportunity to do a bit of discussion about best practices in terms of ways to configure EZProxy to make it less maintenance-intensive on the institutional side – I think that proxy configuration suggestions this will be an important point to emphasize in our documentation of individual campus implementations (examples: whether to route shib-enabled resources through the proxy, adding catalog / library page / link resolvers to the resource configuration files, use of proxy for campus traffic, bookmarklets, etc).

 

Don Hamparian from OCLC was there as well, and we discussed possibilities for integrating shibboleth information into some of the institutional identifier efforts taking place (presentation attached), as well as having an opportunity to publically talk up Shibboleth and the Shib-enabled rewrite proxy at the EZProxy meet-and-greet at ALA Annual on Sunday, June 29.

 

One issue that came up re: shib adoption was smaller institutions and publishers, For institutions, there was the question of being able to implement and maintain shibboleth consortially (to combine IT efforts), as well as encouraging smaller publishers to have conversations with their platform vendors.

 

I created a temporary page (incorporating the links from Dean’s page as well as the initial public links) at http://blog.ucsd.edu/heggleston/2008/06/05/getting-started-with-shibboleth-for-libraries/ -- this will eventually redirect to our public page.

 

Thanks!

 

Holly

 

Holly Eggleston

Assistant Department Head, Acquisitions

UC San Diego Libraries

858.534.9668

858.534.1256 (fax)

(personal)

(licensing and electronic resources)

 

Attachment: 2008 Conference Using Institutional and Library Identifiers.ppt
Description: 2008 Conference Using Institutional and Library Identifiers.ppt