Home New & Noteworthy Shibboleth Preconference

Elsevier joins ALA preconference on Project Shibboleth

Advance registration is now closed.  On-site registration will be accepted as space permits.

InterContinental Hotel, 505 N. Michigan Ave., King Arthur's Court Room

Advance registration has ended, but there is space still available for this important preconference. See below for details on how to participate.

When you want to share secured online services or access restricted digital content, the Shibboleth system ( http://shibboleth.internet2.edu/ ) offers a powerful, scalable, and easy-to-use solution. It leverages campus identity and access management infrastructures to authenticate individuals and then sends information about them to the resource site, enabling the resource provider to make an informed authorization decision. Shibboleth software is at work today providing this capability—it’s a powerful, secure, standards based, user friendly, inter-realm access control solution for research and education.

The Shibboleth system provides a standards-based link between existing campus authentication systems and resource providers of all kinds. For example, when a student requests access to a protected video clip, her home organization requests her to authenticate (if she has not done so already) and then passes on the information that she is enrolled in Biology 562 to the site housing the video. The provider (target site) uses the fact that she is enrolled in this course to determine her eligibility to access the video.  Indeed, her academic major (Biology) can also be passed along, allowing the provider to customize a view of all biology related resources available at the provider site for the benefit of the student.

Numerous campuses and higher education associations as well as content, service, and learning management system vendors are continuing to work on improvements and enhancements to the Shibboleth system.

LITA's preconference on Shibboleth will be led by Keith Hazelton and Tom Barton, both of whom are senior IT integrators at major universities, and deeply involved with ongoing development of the Shibboleth Project.

Several librarians will be sharing their experiences with and ideas concerning integration of library networked services with Shibboleth.

Elsevier has recently agreed to join our morning panel of service providers. Also participating on this panel are representatives from Dynix, Ex Libris, JSTOR, OCLC, and Proquest. This panel will share how their various products and services integrate with Shibboleth, and what that integration means to libraries.