The Great Ideal

In this last session, I heard David Kennedy of USMAI discuss the way in which they used Shibboleth to create single sign on between all of their services. They have accomplished what every library patron using a website wants. In short, users in their libraries only have to log in once to get access to their Aleph account, MetaLib, journals suggested by SFX, etc. Eventually, they would like to see single sign on for all of their campuses, including the campus wide portals. They use Shibboleth, PDS (which is native in MetaLib), and EZProxy to accomplish this. The really amazing thing to me is that they are providing this service for a consortium of 14 institutions, all of which have virtually separate identity providers! They also used Shibboleth to work around the universal tendency of every institution to change barcodes structures every three months. Instead, they have persistent identifiers for each patron. Using Shibboleth also provides them more security, because all private information transfers server to server, without ever being displayed on a browser. For more information, see the USMAI project page. One can also find information through the Ex Libris CRM portal.