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April 13, 2005
CNI briefing session: Shibboleth and InCommon
Steven Carmody, "Mr. Shibboleth Of All", gave a project briefing on recent activities with Shibboleth, an inter-institutional approach to authentication and resource sharing that is beginning to replace IP address authentication for sharing electronic library resources, especially those licensed from commercial publishers. (I note that Case has a nascent Shibboleth pilot project.) Mr. Carmody pointed out that Shibboleth is now poised for wide-scale adoption. NSF will adopt Shibboleth for its Fastlane service on July 30 as part of the US Government's e-authentication initiative. A number of library vendors with whom we do business have already implemented Shibboleth. These include EBSCO, Elsevier, OCLC, JSTOR, and ProQuest. OhioLINK is beginning a pilot project, of which Case is a part.
What this means to the end-user is that in most cases a login (your Case ID and password) will be required to use library resources to their fullest level. Some lower level of service might be available through IP address authentication. (These policy issues have not yet been determined for Case.) There are several issues that are raised for libraries, the most significant of which is library walk-in visitors. Mr. Carmody said, "We have a way to handle that;" however, he did not elaborate.
The bottom line is that vendors of online electronic resources for libraries are becoming much more aggressive about enforcing their licensing agreements and the days of "everybody can use it for free" may be drawing to a close.
Posted by tdr at April 13, 2005 04:18 PM
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