InCommon Library Services

[Dean Woodbeck <>]

Draft Minutes
InC-Library Collaboration
July 24, 2009

**Attending**

Steve Carmody, Brown University (chair)
Paul Hill, MIT
Thomas Howell, Northwestern University
Randy Junus, Michigan State University
Dave Kennedy, Duke University
RL Bob Morgan, University of Washington
Mark Scheible, North Carolina State University
Ann West, Internet2
Foster Zhang, Johns Hopkins University
Fred Zhang, Michigan State University
Dean Woodbeck, Internet2 (scribe)

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Vendor Subgroup Report

Dave Kennedy reported that the vendor subgroup has continued its individual 
investigations and has begun working directly with vendors concerning 
Shibboleth access to services. The group has started building a registry of 
Shib-enabled services and has polled the top 10 vendors to get answers on how 
and what they’ve implemented. A summary of responses to date is available at 
https://spaces.internet2.edu/x/2IFz 

Two of the 10 vendors have indicated an interest in joining InCommon 
(Thompson Reuters and BioOne). Many of the others are either current InCommon 
members and/or are established in the Shibboleth community. 

In doing this poling and compiling the registry, the subgroup is starting to 
understand the similarities and differences among the vendors, as well as 
getting a sense for what libraries would like to see from SPs. The group 
plans to document best practices for vendors, likely calling on interested 
vendor representatives to help. The subgroup may also develop recommendations 
for libraries.

There was a discussion about entitlement values (such as CommonLibTerm) and 
why they aren’t being used. Dave Kennedy commented that he is going to start 
contacting SPs that Duke works with and ask them to start using the value. 
Bob Morgan said that communications to SPs by groups of libraries lets the SP 
know that such things are an issue for those in the federation. 

There was also a discussion about walk-in patrons and the creation of the 
LibraryWalkin value following extensive conversations about a year ago. In 
fact, the MACE-Dir working group’s recommendation is to use the LibraryWalkin 
and eduPerson affiliation values, but this has not been widely promoted in 
the right places. 

Steven Carmody pointed out some of the factors that led to the creation of 
entitlement values – including situations where some populations had broader 
library access rights than the entire community. For example, those 
associated with medical schools, business schools and law schools, for 
example, would have access to additional resources, as compared to a typical 
undergraduate. There has, however, been a lack of momentum in the U.S. 
library space over this issue in the last couple of years and several 
European countries are now in the forefront.

The next step in this process might be the idea of microlicensing, in which 
students in specific courses have access to certain specific articles or 
other resources. The concept is that an attribute-based approach might enable 
that. 

Steven asked if campuses have these sorts of situations and, if so, whether 
there is interest in addressing this with Shibboleth. There was interest 
expressed, not just for professional schools but also for affiliated 
organizations (such as research labs).

Currently, people try to manage such situations with IP addresses, but that 
does not work well. With a cooperative vendor, it is feasible to use 
Shibboleth and attributes to present entitlement values for access to 
resources by some subset of the campus population. When a user signs in, the 
SP would receive an entitlement value to filter such access. But there aren’t 
any examples currently of such an arrangement.

There are examples of using Shibboleth and EZProxy to provide such access by 
creating EZProxy groups and mapping users into these groups based on 
Shibboleth attributes. Students from the law school, for example, would be 
part of a “law” group. 

Dave Kennedy presented the example of providing only medical students access 
to a medical journal by using proxies. This model breaks down, however, when 
the publisher has multiple journals and you want to limit access to just one.

In addition, Paul Hill pointed out that more vendors are providing direct 
Shibboleth access, which means users don’t always have to go through EZProxy. 
For such situations, MIT is looking at a resolver plug-in on the IdP. 

Steven suggested that the use case subgroup identity the set of use cases 
related to this sort of special permissions for various subsets of a campus 
population, including identifying the situations that this collaboration 
group needs to worry about. It would also be useful to figure out if there is 
an existing campus that is equipped to explore addressing this situation with 
attributes. In developing this use case, it would be good to describe the 
situation and constraints, while remaining technology-neutral. So the use 
case might be “the campus community has access to articles 1-100 from vendor 
X. The medical faculty also has access to articles 101-150 from the same 
vendor.”

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Use Case Subgroup Report

Thomas Howell reported that the use case subgroup is working on adequately 
describing all of the use cases. They have spent time developing a template 
for describing use cases as a way to standardize the information. The wiki 
includes the template, plus use cases developed using the template. At this 
point, the wiki also divides the use cases into categories of basic and 
advanced. There is also a place to write up cases that are vendor- or 
situation-specific.

Two of the areas that have consumed the most time and energy are Shibbolizing 
EZProxy (at least one campus is working with Refworks on this), and 
accommodating walk-in library patrons. It seems that there are as many ways 
to deal with the walk-in situation as there are libraries; however, the group 
is going to try describe some of the more common and/or generic ways for 
doing this.

To summarize the subgroups approach, they will 1) start with use cases that 
would arise from a campus using an EZProxy/Shibboleth hybrid; 2) then write 
up the more advanced use cases (where some edge cases start to appear); and 
3) then worry about vendor-specific approaches.

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Next Steps

The consensus was that the subgroups will meet during the next three weeks 
and the entire collaboration group will convene on August 21.