I recently enjoyed attending the UK Serials Group conference in Warwick. This was a good opportunity to meet with a variety of publishers and institutions to discuss the impact of JISC’s approach to federated access management. My two sessions were well attended, and a UKSG blog report is available.

I was pleased to hear T Scott Plutchak discuss the importance of librarians ‘connecting people to knowledge’ in his plenary speech - echoing the JISC middleware campaign for ‘connecting people to resources’. This highlighted the importance of the role of both technology and skilled staff in meeting the needs of our users.

The number of sessions on ‘people’ identifiers was also very notable. I’ve been aware for some time that this is an area that we really need to start focusing on at JISC. Helen Henderson of Ringgold Ltd described a project looking at the use of institutional identifiers in the journal supply chain, reminding me of the Institutional Profiling study carried out by JISC in 2003. Perhaps it is time for us to revisit this study? I was also very interested in Daniel van Spanje’s presentation on DAI: Digital Author Identifiers - something that may well come up at the JISC Repositories Conference.

It was good to see a significant update to the UKSG website, and the introduction of the UKSG blog. This reflected the other major theme of the conference - the importance of web 2.0 and its impact on librarians and publishers. Look out for Stephen Abram’s excellent presentation on library 2.0 when it is posted. Stephen gave some interesting examples of how librarians are supporting users in their own virtual environments - through blogs, face book, second life and other applications - and challenged the audience to be ready for demand for these approaches. He also described a training programme for librarians covering 23 web 2.0 things covering everything from uploading digital photos to using and managing rss feeds.

Jane and I recently attended the TERENA tf-emc2 meeting in Florence. The purpose of this task force is to provide an opportunity for collaboration and discussion between those leading access management and middleware agendas across Europe - and it is a fantastic opportunity to get a reality check on the federated access management developments within the UK. Many of the same issues are being addressed by all of the members of the task force, and the event provided a good opportunity to learn more about some impressive developments. A few of the highlights were…

• Report on SCS developments. The UK is already benefiting from this very effective initiative and JANET connected organisations can now apply for free server certificates from UKERNA.
• Discussions on the applicability of Open-ID and CardSpace to national Federations. Bob Morgan’s presentation and lead in discussion provided some valuable insights that we will be feeding in to JISC development work.
• SCHAC work on defining common schemas across Europe and examining shared definitions of schema terms.

Definitions for schema terms have been discussed at many symposia in the UK recently. A JISC Licensing workshop in December highlighted the concerns of library staff over the use of generic terms such as ‘member’ and ’staff’ within licensing terms, and the extent to which these covered visiting professors, casual staff and other users with temporary or peripheral status as a member of the institution.

Further discussion of shared definition of these terms is likely to provoke some interesting debate, and it is important that we take this forward a way that enables access where it is permitted rather than as a restricting activity.

We have received a lot of interest about animation from other European countries, particularly the Google version which has subtitles attached. Obviously subtitling improves accessibility – but another benefit is quick and easy repurposing of the content in other languages.

To add subtitles no coding is required – just:

1.Upload a video to Google Video

2. Choose the “add caption” option

3. Paste in the subtitle text into the caption window - with time code markers (see picture).

It works best if you keep the amount of words between consecutive time codes short, and plan on 5 seconds or more for each subtitle.

An example of the animation with Italian subtitles.

One of the issues that institutions face when joining the UK Access Management Federation is whether to sign up to ‘accountability’. This is a complex area, and has raised many questions, so I am hoping to address some of these issues here.

The Rules of the UK Federation (section 6.4.2) state that:

“where unique persistent Attributes (e.g. eduPersonTargetedID or eduPersonPrincipalName) are associated with an End User, the End User Organisation must ensure that these Attribute values are not re-issued to another End User for at least 24 months;”

Simply put, this means that you must not re-issue a targetedID or PrincipleName to another member of staff or student within 24 months and you must be able to declare that you will not do this. This is not a requirement for institutions; you can choose not to support this function. However choosing not to support this attributes means that an institution would not be able to use persistent attributes. For many resources this will be fine – but there are significant resources that require the release of at least an opaque persistent identifier for users, such as when using census data. It also means that personalisation is not possible for end-users, and will affect many of the emerging use-cases for federated access management.

At the moment, only about 33% of the Identity Providers within the Federation are asserting user accountability. We are sure that some of the institutions that are not declaring user accountability will wish to make use of resources that require this function. From this, I can make two assumptions:

• the people responsible for signing the Federation documents are not aware that this function will be required and are choosing the path of least resistance. This is understandable and very reversible once the requirement is known. To tackle this, the UK Federation has recently changed its joining processes to query accountability choices more closely and we have seen an increase in institutions declaring accountability since this process has been introduced. We strongly encourage institutions to involve library staff, IT staff and senior management in the process of joining the UK Federation to make sure that all requirements are fully understood before a decision is made

• Identity management within institutions is not mature enough to cope with the requirement. Federated access management does require effective identity management, and this will be a big leap for many institutions. There are many ways to get help in this area from case studies and advice from the JISC ‘early adopter’ projects to third-party support from commercial vendors. For more information, see the JISC Federation website.

Although declaring accountability is only a recommendation within the Federation, we would like to see all institutions getting the most out of the new system and would certainly encourage everyone to ‘aspire’ to meeting all of the recommendations made. If you would like further advice in this area, please do not hesitate to contact the JISC Access Management Team.

A new JISC animation explains the concepts behind the UK Access Management Federation, presenting the advantages of identity management and outlining the key steps for institutions.

The five-minute animation assumes no prior technical knowledge and provides a clear overview for those making strategic decisions concerning access management within their institutions. ‘Feedback has already been very positive, especially from those IT managers who need to explain to their staff why important and far-reaching changes need to be made.’

The UK Access Management Federation provides UK educational institutions and service providers with the opportunity to take advantage of the new possibilities offered by sophisticated identity management solutions such as Shibboleth.

Federated, single, institutionally-controlled identity, which removes the need for multiple passwords and the associated risk, provides users with access to their host institutions’ resources - and any that they subscribe to - from home, work, or any other location.

Institution librarians will have reduced password administration while gaining new opportunities for managing licenses and subscriptions while service providers such as publishers will gain increased confidence in the security of their resources protected by technologies such as shibboleth.

With the ending of JISC subscription to Athens on behalf of UK FE / HE in July 2008, membership of the Federation provides UK universities, schools and colleges with the next step in educational access to resources.

Mark Williams, Access Management Outreach Coordinator, helped develop the animation. He says that the new animation ‘brings to life what can otherwise be dry and difficult concepts to convey.’

‘The establishment of the UK Access Management Federation and JISC’s plans for access management in general,’ he continues, ‘require a number of important decisions on the part of institutions, and this animation sets out some of these in an accessible and non-technical way. Feedback has already been very positive, especially from those IT managers who need to explain to their staff why important and far-reaching changes need to be made.’

You can find out more and download or view the animation in a variety of formats on the JISC website..