InsideOLITA

If you deal with library authentication at all for licensed content, you have probably heard that Shibboleth, a “system designed to exchange attributes across realms for the primary purpose of authorization” is coming real soon for a few years now. Alan Darnell, at Scholar’s Portal, describes a pilot project that took place this summer that involved 3 universities in the province. Despite the somewhat confusing documentation and concepts, Shibboleth is a solid option for authentication. The best way to appreciate Shibboleth is to see it from the browser, for example:

Before you see this screen, you are presented with a public key certificate as part of using an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for your web interactions. If you accept the certificate, you are handed over to a WAYF (Where Are You From) service, a Shibboleth function for passing you on to a service that can handle authentication duties. You end up at the authentication source for your institution and must
authenticate to actually use the desired resource, for example.

Some of these steps are remarkably similar to what is experienced when carrying out online shopping, and Shibboleth brings more industrial strength security to accessing online resources. Although this might seem like more steps than what is entailed in using popular systems like EZproxy, many of these settings are stored as cookies, and are not required the next time around. The user is also completely on their own network, not round-tripping to the library’s server and network for every web page. More importantly, Shibboleth can help anonymize the user’s interaction with the resource, the resource provider does not need to know the user’s identity, and the library does not need to have a record of every page and link utilized in the user’s information gathering process.

Shibboleth is a much more network sensible and privacy aware solution than the vast majority of approaches used in libraries to provide remote access to licensed content. It is well worth getting the status of where Shibboleth is in terms of development priorities when licensing content, and pushing for implementations in both the library, and on the part of those who provide content that must be limited to the library’s user community. Shibboleth is not only ready for prime time, it is long overdue in an increasingly complex networked world.

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