Shibboleth Developers

[Peter Murray <>]

--On Tuesday, April 27, 2004 1:15 PM -0700 Jennifer Vine 
<> wrote:
> Sorry, this message got lost behind a flurry of administrivia I just
> cleared out of my email folders.

I fell into the same boat.  I'm getting my head above water just long 
enough for the wave of four solid days of WebCT Vista strategic 
planning to happen this week.

> > One of the key pieces for this for library (or, eventually, end user)
> > to specify the unique-yet-not-identifiable attribute back to the
> > resource provider for the purpose of offering a customized
> > environment  in an anonymous setting.  I expect it may be one of the
> > attributes that can be added to the policy (the pull-down list on
> > <http://www.stanford.edu/~jvine/shibboleth/mockups/7/custom.html>),
> > but I wanted to be sure it was accounted for, maybe even in a
> > explicit way before sending the mockup out to the focus group.
>
> I think what you're asking about here is the "targeted ID", which also
> didn't come up in the calls. In the context of accepting a template
> as-is and applying it to a community - would the "targeted ID" simply
> be something that was agreed upon in the contract, and expressed by an
> attribute or combination of attributes in the template?

I don't expect it would be in the contract or in the vendor-supplied 
template.  "Targeted ID" doesn't ring a bell in the Shibboleth 
architecture, but what I was thinking of was closer to the 'Indexical 
Reference' -- something that uniquely, but opaquely, identifies a user 
and (unlike a Handle) is persistent over long periods of time.

This would be used to set up customized features in a target's service 
(e.g. saved searches, a "my bookbag" functionality) that would be 
available over time but would be done in such a way that the user's 
identity is exposed through the Shibboleth protocol.  (The user may 
choose to expose it in other ways, such as providing an e-mail address 
or other information to the target's services.)

> > One of the hot new topics in library automation now is the creation
> > of "Electronic Resource Management" tools.
> [...]
> > The reason for bringing all of this up, though, is there will likely
> > be a need for an automated way to move information from an Electronic
> > Resource Management tool in the libraries to the ARP.
>
> Yeesh, I thought this was a hot new topic when I moved out of library
> automation a decade ago... :-)  But it also came up from someone else
> - Beth? - in yesterday's call, and I don't recall or didn't capture
> in my notes what we decided, if anything. It looks to me like the UI
> implications of data exchange with an ERM are not huge - common
> terminology where appropriate, things of that nature.

It probably depends on the specifications of the 'template'.  The 
Digital Library Federation has gone through a great deal of work to 
specify an 'Electronic Resource Management' framework -- complete with 
"common specifications and tools for managing the license agreements, 
related administrative information, and internal processes associated 
with collections of licensed electronic resources."  The first 
paragraph of their Problem Statement might sound a bit familiar to some 
of the issues solved of Shibboleth and the ARP editor:

   Libraries and vendors face significant challenges in the new
   digital publishing environment.  One of these challenges is to
   manage the information and workflows necessary to acquire and
   provide access to electronic resources.   The growth of electronic
   journals and databases has both complicated and transformed the
   acquisition and servicing of library materials.  New information
   and workflows are required to evaluate, select, acquire, license,
   catalog, and manage electronic products throughout their
   life-cycle.
   <http://www.diglib.org/standards/dlf-erm02.htm>

All told, it may be a superset of information that is in the template, 
but I haven't found any documentation describing what is in there yet.


Peter
--
Peter Murray                      http://www.pandc.org/peter/work/
Assistant to the Director for Technology Initiatives  860-486-6771
University of Connecticut Libraries            Storrs, Connecticut