RSC Northwest have an online TV channel (well rolling items on a loop)

There is a piece about WAYFless urls but that’s not the reason to watch. The fun interactivity, Max Headroom style and another way to present content is!

Also just a reminder to librarians to ensure they are on the JISC-SHIBBOLETH@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
and or JISC-SHIBBOLETH-LIBRARIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK (which is for institutions only). Lots of useful info on ways poepele are linking to resources and any issues that are coming up.

This blog focuses on middlewhere but sometimes its good to remind oneself of what exactly we are getting access to, essentially to borrow George Marshalls (of Marshall plan fame) phrase - “why we fight”. Well a number of stars are aligning all of the sudden to get me excited about ebooks. I Played with an e-ink based e-reader in a highstreet bookshop, with generally good impressions - have just seen video of the e-ink cover of Esquire magazine in the states - and finally have seen that both the States and Ireland are promoting e-books and readers to school students. Well we won’t be using access management to support an e-ink download tomorrow or even the day after that, but it can’t be too long until it all comes together in the perfect symbiotic relationship (think iphoness for ereaders) and ebooks on e-ink ereaders become an everyday product. Now that will pose all sorts of questions for mobile access……

Apologies for the amount of e’s in that last sentence, they will all be absorbed into their compound parents in time…….

Well the big day came and went and as expected pretty much most of Academia was on leave, well the librarians are back (I suspect The IT staff never went away given the August window for deploying new IT systems in institutions). We’ve been receiving a few calls about content access and finding the issue / problem is very similar to finding that hole in a bike puncture. Mostly, the issues are process based human ones. Such as Library tells IT they have lost access to a resource - IT thinks it may be an access management issue - shibboleth being mispronounced or something. IT then calls us - we check and find a license hasn’t been renewed. So fault finding just like pretty much everything else in the access management endeavour is a cross college activity.