JISC Access Management Team

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.