InCommon Library Services

[Dean Woodbeck <>]

This note was originally sent to the Shib users list, but may be of interest to any of you attending the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting next week in Atlanta. 

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I've organised a side-meeting at the I2FMM in Atlanta for anyone interested in getting usage stats out of the Shibboleth IdP and/or EZproxy (and other similar pieces of software). 

Many organisations are needing to be able to pull such information out of the log files that these produce in a way that can be easily consumed by both technical and non-technical users alike. This is particularly important here in the UK in the current economic climate (oh how I hate that phrase!) from the e-resource perspective, where we need to understand usage so that the people in control of library budgets know which resources are worth paying for and which are not.

It's also important to get aggregated stats across multiple entities from the federation point of view for those federations primarily funded by some central body of their home country (e.g. the UK federation) since they have a need to demonstrate value for money to the funders.

To answer this problem, the JISC in the UK have funded the RAPTOR project which is currently underway, and SWITCH have a similar ongoing effort in the AMAAIS project. Alongside these, there are other tools available and also many people have built and customised their own bits of code to do this in their own way.

So, in this side meeting we'll have some project updates from both the RAPTOR and AMAAIS project for those that are interested (including maybe some demos of the software as they currently stand), and then we'll switch to round table discussion mode about everyone's thoughts about what is needed in the area of usage stats in a federated world; discussion about what tools people already use and their experience with them; discussion about tools that have been custom built that could be shared with the community (if anyone has them); and so on and so forth.

The meeting is scheduled for the Tuesday lunchtime of the I2FMM - Tue 2nd Nov 12PM-1PM - in Waverly. If you're interested in this topic of discussion, please do come join us. Hope to see some of you there!

N.B. Please forward this on to anyone who you think might be interested in attending the meeting.

Best Regards,
Rhys.
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Dr Rhys Smith                                   e: 
Engineering Consultant: Identity & Access Management  (GPG:0xDE2F024C)
Information Services,
Cardiff University,                            t: +44 (0) 29 2087 0126
39-41 Park Place, Cardiff,                     f: +44 (0) 29 2087 4285
CF10 3BB, United Kingdom.                      m: +44 (0) 7968 087 821
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