| Philip Mattingly Senior Operating Systems Specialist Texas Digital Library |
David Kennedy Applications Developer University of Maryland at College Park |
| Scott Phillips Research & Development Coordinator Texas A&M University |
Adding Shibboleth to an Existing Library Services Access Control Infrastructure (Kennedy)
Campus libraries use a patchwork of approaches to enforce access control to licensed resources; the list usually includes IP-based access control, proxies for access from off-campus, VPN, userids and passwords, REFERER_URL, etc. Each of these approaches is problematic and creates confusion for users. The standards-based Shibboleth federating and single sign-on software was developed to address the shortcomings of these methods while maintaining the privacy of the patron.
Adoption of Shibboleth as a higher education standard across much of western Europe has encouraged major information vendors to support it in production. Libraries are now asking about the potential policy, business practice and value, technology, and user experience issues that would have to be addressed if they were to add Shibboleth to their existing access control framework. This session will present the findings of librarians and information technology staff from five campuses (Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Chicago, and the University of California at San Diego) who have been working together to explore these questions.
Handout (MS Word)
Shibboleth: Enabling Collaboration Across Institutions (Mattingly & Phillips)
The mission of the Texas Digital Library (TDL) is to provide infrastructure to enable new forms of scholarly communication and collaboration in higher education in Texas. TDL supports this mission through an array of services such as institutional repositories, a peer-reviewed journaling system, and blogs. The Shibboleth authentication framework allows for secure collaboration among the various universities. TDL created the infrastructure to support a multi-institution Shibboleth federation because no such state-wide federation existed in Texas. Presently, five schools spanning separate university systems are active in the federation, and others are in the process of joining it.
Handout (PDF)