When I started with RSC Wales back in June 2007 one of the first things I did was attend a JISC Access Management (AM) event. And here I am again a few years on, having just got back from the 2009 event which I attended hoping to find out what the current access management landscape looks like. What has changed and what have we learned in the interim?

I’ll blog about some of the sessions and some of my thoughts, with  inevitable emphasis on the areas most relevant to libraries and LRCs. I haven’t been Tweeting with the rest of the Twittoratti, but there was plenty to digest on the #fam09 tag.

If you want to find out more about the event you can view the programme, download many of the presentations or visit the FAM09 social site.

First, a recap of the access management options for e-resources

Shibboleth (by which I mean Federated Access Management) was the main option under discussion. It requires either in-house support, or you can pay a third party to set to it and provide support until you have enough in-house experience.

A related option, offering the same functionality, is to pay for a subscription to the OpenAthens Service, to gain Shibboleth-like features. I think of the Shibboleth/OpenAthens options as being like looking for somewhere to live.

OpenAthens is like renting a nice appartment. It is nice to live in, but you can’t do what you like with the apartment (e.g. replacing the windows if you don’t like them), and you will never own the apartment – if ever you stop paying the rent you get kicked out and have nothing to show for the years you paid for. Though while you do pay rent, someone else will (hopefully) be responsible for repairs to the property.

Shibboleth is like buying a house. There is a cost at the start, and you the one reponsible for maintaining the property. You can do that yourself if you have the skill; or pay someone else to do so, and maybe when you understand more go on a DIY course yourself and start to do your own maintenance.

There are two other common access management options, though I can’t think of a way of extending the house analogy to them without it being contrived, so I’ll just describe them straight. One option (often used in conjunction with Shibboleth) is to use the more traditional IP plus proxy solution to on-and-off campus access to resources and services.

There is also sometimes the option to have a single, fixed username and password for off-campus access, which can be workable for small e-resource portfolios. This option is gradually disappearing for many resource providers though.

Some of the sessions I attended

Identity and Access as UK Priority, Sara Marsh and Peter Tinson

This session was a summary of where we came from (beginning in 2004), where we are, where we’re going, and potential barriers to getting there, so was an appropriate conference opener. Sara likened herself to the jam of the talk, sandwiched between Peter’s opening and closing bread. I was glad to see that the bread was wholemeal.

The early landscape was one where there were few Shibbolised resources and a lack of in-house skills. Organisations lacked institutional access management strategies, and IT departments felt that access management was just about access to e-resources, and was therefore only a library issue.

And now? All but a few of the big publishers offer Federated Access Management as an option, and those that don’t offer it are under increasing pressure. UCISA and SCONUL surveys found that access and identity management is now in the top ten strategic issues listed by their members, so the importance has risen (though the issue is not at the top of the list).

What is needed for the future? Two main things stood out. Firstly access and identity management/Federated Access Management needs to get into top-level strategies. Secondly we need more examples of the benefits early adopters have gained from Federated Access Management in order to make the strongest possible management case.

Federated Access, the Library Experience, Sarah Pearson, Richard Cross and Francis Lowry

The experiences of two institutions (the University of Birmingham and Nottingham Trent University) in implementing Shibboleth. Many of the things said rang true to my experiences of being involved with a university implementation.

Sarah Pearson spoke about the Birmingham experience. In Birmingham they have used Shibboleth to implement single sign-on (SSO) to Metalib (their federated search tool) and EZproxy, but not to the VLE yet. They try to push users through Metalib as the primary means of accessing e-resources, since then the library can make access more seamless to users.

Sarah showed a diagram of the various ways in which a user at the University of Birmingham accesses e-resources (see below – click to enlarge). It illustrates the complexity of managing the various access options – a diagram like that can be a valuable thing for any library to create in attempting to identify areas which need work.

Collaboration for the University of Birmingham Shibboleth implementation was between:

• Serials Team (Library Services)
  They activated e-resources, customised links, implemented authentication, and did troubleshooting.
• Digital Library Team (IT Services)
  Managed Metalib and SFX installation including interaction with the IdP (Identity Provider)
• Networks Team (IT Services)
  Setup and maintenance of IdP and interaction with BIIS registry

See Sarah’s presentation for the implementation timescale and process – it shows the complexity of the move from the librarian’s perspective, all the processes involved before you even reach the user education element! Issues such as contacting service providers, finding out what information to provide, obtaining WAYFLess URL information, testing etc is all time-consuming, and if you need to manage resources in a federated search tool like Metalib there are extra steps.

One issue Sarah raised was the fact that some users will navigate directly to a resource rather than going through the library portal, so they will have to deal with WAYFs. Her team has now incorporated that route into their user education (guidance on Metalib and in induction).

Then Richard and Francis gave the Nottingham Trent University perspective. Nottingham Trent University were early Shibboleth adopters, and the central message I took away from their part of the presentation was the positive one that they had experienced no problems, Shibboleth has been stable with no downtime, and it all just worked from day one – on which day it was heavily used by students to take advantage of Microsoft’s free DreamSpark offer (it requires an institution to be using Federated Access Management for their students to benefit – another reason to switch!)

A valuable piece of advice from the presentation was that they never refer to Shibboleth when communicating with users, they only talk about the ‘University username and password’. Obviously they refer to it among library and IT staff though.

In terms of transition, they had a roadmap and a blog to inform staff. They also created a wiki that includes every e-resource they subscribe to and how users access it (since terminology varies from provider to provider), so that staff know how to help off-campus users for each resource. Bear in mind that the help staff on campus won’t see login screens, they will be automatically validated via IP, so this kind of information is invaluable for user suppport. Richard and Francis lamented that there is no consistency of terminology in how Service Providers refer to the login options, necessitating this approach.

The main lessons Richard and Francis wished to share:

• Plan early
• IT and library staff must work together (a partnership emphasised in other talks too)
• Communicate with Service Providers – don’t assume anything
• Don’t expect glowing praise from users – access management should be invisible to them if it works (but expect complaints when it doesn’t!)

They concluded that it is an ongoing process of development, it is not all over on the day that Shibboleth is installed. Also Shibboleth is not a solution to everything, but it is an important and flexible building block in the organisation’s infrastructure.

There were some similarities between the setup at the two universities. For example, both institutions currently use a combination of Shibboleth, IP/EZProxy and other methods (for a minority of resources). Both are currently using Shibboleth 1.3 but are planning to move to version 2.

Both also agreed on some of the challenges:

• There are personalisation issues when using dual authentication (e.g. Shibboleth plus IP). However they can be dealt with e.g. Nottingham Trent University migrated accounts wholesale where possible (e.g. for Refworks) and when that wasn’t an option they supported users individually in migrating settings. In a few instances users had to rebuild their personalisation from scratch.
• Not all Service Providers use a standard WAYFless URL structure, and many don’t include the ability to deep-link it e.g. to a particular e-book or database. Those that do have WAYFless structures may not tell you. There is a lack of standards here.

Tech 101 for Librarians, Andy Swiffin

Andy tackled the issue of terminology, trying to unravel the acronyms, as well as placing the emphasis on why and how you deploy an IdP (Identity Provider). He emphasised the relative simplicity of the process – if you have a web server with Tomcat, and have an identity source e.g. LDAP or Microsoft Active Directory, then you can do it easily. Andy has done a Shibboleth install and configured and tested it in just 12 minutes!

Why adopt FAM?

The same answers came up in a number of sessions, so it makes sense to just summarise the common answers here.

• Increased user privacy.
• KISS – Keep things simple for the user by enabling single-sign-on (SSO) for internal and external resources.
• Granularity – Federated Access Management enables fine-grained authorisation, so it should be possible to save money by only buying a specialist resource for the group that needs it, rather than paying for a subscription for the whole institution that will only be used by a few people. Obviously the ideal from a librarian’s perspective is to offer access to everyone, but as Sara Marsh pointed out – if it is a choice between paying for access for a group that needs something, or not getting the resource at all because access for the entire organisation is too expensive, the former is better than no access at all.

Social gaming

After the evening meal on Monday there was a games room for socialising to take place in. Four Nintendo Wiis were set up so that people could compete in Mario Kart, boxing, baseball, ten-pin bowling, Wii Fit and winter sports; along with giant Jenga and Connect 4, table football and air hockey. I put in some sterling defence work on the table football, but my gaming ability was a major letdown at ten-pin bowling, and for some reason my bowling ball always ended up in the gutter or – even worse – rolling away from me in the wrong direction. I’m almost certain that it was a faulty controller :-p but it made it look like I couldn’t hold my own in a Wii-ing contest.

An exciting new, free JISC-funded resource launched last week, relevant to many subjects. A Vision of Britain Through Time gives access to over two centuries’ worth of acts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing, showing how 15,000 UK places have changed.

Project director, Dr Humphrey Southall, of the University of Portsmouth, says:

Through the site we are offering an unprecedented amount of information detailing how Britain has changed over many centuries. Simply keying in a place-name or postcode unlocks a vast treasury of facts, figures, images and descriptions – from mediaeval boundaries to what the 2001 Census uncovered via, perhaps, a town’s appearance on a 19th century map, a comment by a touring agitator, a crop report from the 1930s and more. The range and depth of the information makes it a terrific resource for professional and amateur historians who want a complete picture of what a place was like at a particular point in history, but the site isn’t only a way to look back. The content is already in demand from researchers and forecasters watching for changes and trends of relevance now or in the future.

JISC digitisation programme manager, Alastair Dunning, added:

This new site is an excellent example of what JISC is enabling, and why. By helping the project to improve its historic boundary maps and add new, fully cross-indexed, content, JISC is making it easier for scholars across all disciplines, to access data. While also granting free access to researchers from other sectors, including healthcare planners, local government, climatologists and the ever growing number of people who are interested in
local and family history.

Read more about JISC’s digitisation programme.

I decided to put it to the test, so spent an hour exploring the site with my nephew. We compared facts and figures for Aberystwyth and Manchester, and discussed the implications of some of the graphs and statistics.

The negatives:

• Sometimes we got a bit lost, for example not all the maps had an explanatory key; or it would be unclear as to the differences between some sets of data.
• The site contains Google Ads (possibly a first for a JISC-funded project, and hopefully not the start of a trend), and the commercial advertising makes it look less like a quality academic resource. I do a lot of information literacy work to do with website evaluation, and one of the areas relates to bias/website purpose and includes looking out for advertising as one of the potential criteria for evaluation. I was running a session on this recently so the advertising seemed to stand out.

The positives:

• The site includes a wealth of valuable material, especially if you are willing to dig around and explore.
• The site led us to lots of discussion points.
• The four e-learning tutorials were a useful way in to navigate some of the themes.

Monday 15th – Wednesday 17th October I was in Birmingham (Sutton Coldfield) for the RSC UK Conference. This was a chance for staff from all fourteen RSCs across the UK to come together, along with staff from JISC Services such as TechDIS, JISC Collections and TASI.

A social networking service, Ning, was used before the conference for networking and the setting up of topic groups. This partially drove the agenda forward, and the usage determined some of the sessions that ran during the conference, which is an interesting way of organising things. One advantage is that the online networking and profiles meant I had an idea of who was who before I even got there, which is valuable, especially with so many people attending.

Day 1 looked at how Web 2.0 technologies can be utilised by learning providers. Sessions covered Web 2.0 topics such as the following:

• Mashups
• Web 2.0 desktops – online services used for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations.
• Legal aspects – e.g. what happens when YouTube shows a fight at a local college; what are the libel dangers of FaceBook?
• Technical aspects of Web 2.0 – e.g. issues of access and security.
• Second Life – a useful medium for learning about ’social’ subjects such as psychology and business?
• Mobile technologies – how can smart phones and PDAs aid communication and help remote learners? Can they help teaching and learning on outdoor courses such as civil engineering and horticulture?

Day 2 was for topic groups. I attended the sessions on ‘access management of learning resources’ and ‘multi-user virtual environments’ (MUVEs).

The latter is a recent interest, mentioned in a previous blog entry. I suppose my interest in this is curiosity about the uses for LRCs; networking; education; and communications. Not just Second Life but any MUVE (Multi-User Virtual Environment). The low-requirement ones that can display in a browser or Moodle course sound very interesting. Anyway, I have just added the relevant JISCmail list to my growing collection of subscribed lists!

Two new JISC podcasts on the subject of Web 2.0 were released recently.

The first is ‘What is Web 2.0 and how is it impacting on education?‘ It lasts about ten minutes, and acts as a briefing on some of the implications of Web 2.0 for educational institutions. You can download it and play it on your PC or an MP3 player. The official blurb says:

“Students are increasingly becoming familiar with using social networking and other interactive web services such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. This phenomenon has important implications for educational institutions as students increasingly expect such services – or at least aspects of such services – to be mirrored in the delivery of courses.

In this podcast, JISC’s Lawrie Phipps and Dave White from the University of Oxford speak about the impact such technologies – commonly gathered under the umbrella term ‘Web 2.0′ – are having on education and research and how institutions can harness them meaningfully and effectively in support of their students. “

The second is ‘TechWatch’s Gaynor Backhouse talks about Web 2.0‘. “The JISC-funded TechWatch service recently published a major – and hugely popular – report on Web 2.0 and its implications for education and research. In this Podcast Philip Pothen speaks to TechWatch’s director Gaynor Backhouse about the work of the service and why the report has been so successful.” (I haven’t listened to that one).

See the RSC Wales Del.icio.us account Web 2.0 section for these and others.

[Spinnaker Tower, Portsmouth - photo courtesy of Lis]

The RSC LTRG group are the Learning Resources Advisors from each of the RSCs around the UK – LTRG stands for ‘Learning and Teaching Resources Group’. The meetings for both days were at the Holiday Inn Express, Portsmouth, at Gunwharf Quays.

Monday 17th July

As well as the general business of the meeting, there were a number of talks.

First was Liam Earney of JISC Collections, talking about recent developments and looking at how the RSCs can work more effectively with JISC Collections. JISC Collections is one of the main sources to go to in order to see what e-resource deals are available to LRCs.

Scott Gibbons from Coutts Library Services then gave a talk on the Coutts E-books service, MyiLibrary. A couple of Welsh FE colleges have already signed up to MyiLibrary.

[I interrupt this broadcast in order to have a ranting fit against the modern trend towards cutesy pronoun-appropriating egoism in names - from the iPod, to MySpace, to Windows ME, to the Nintendo Wii (pronounced 'We'). Coutts managed to beat that by combining two of the terms in the name of their e-books platform. I am just waiting for a company to offer 'MyIBookmineME'. Ah, the egocentrism of popular culture. Sorry, rant over, normal service is resumed.]

The Coutts platform has a number of features:

• Unlimited multi-user access (if you pay a slightly increased fee).
• Based around the idea of buying individual titles, not bundles you may not need.
• Their platform only shows what you have subscribed to.
• They don’t always have the latest edition of the textbook available online (often due to publisher restrictions, but still something worth being aware of).
• Their system has built-in DRM (Digital Rights Management) – so if you avoid DRM, then you need to be aware of this.
• You own the books you purchase in perpetuity, though have to pay an annual access fee (based on JISC banding, c. £150 for most FE institutions if they are in bands E-J). You can get the books on a CD if you ever stop paying the access fee.
• You can access titles via IP, referring URL, Athens or Shibboleth, or a combination.
• If you subscribe then you can send Coutts ISBNs from reading lists: they will then send you the prices and availability of the titles on MyiLibrary (a free service).
• Currently they have c. 70,000 titles, and are adding more all the time.
• About half of the titles are pdfs, the others are html format.

Peter Godwin from London South Bank University then gave a talk on ‘Information literacy meets Web 2.0′. This was especially useful because I am hoping to work on an information literacy course on the RSC Wales Moodle, that can be used by FE colleges (similar to Hannah’s Podcasting course). Let me know if there is anything you would suggest including!

Peter covered lots of the tools used in Web 2.0 – blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking, media sharing such as Flickr and YouTube, podcasting and so on. It stimulated a lot of thought – in terms of LRC usage, maybe we could get media or drama students involved, and get them to do a video about your library/LRC, then upload it to YouTube: so that as well as being promotional you could use it in inductions or incorporate it into your VLE? YouTube can also be used as a trigger for discussion, e.g. the ‘Librarian’ video Peter played (or the start of this one here) which could be used as part of a student ice-breaker induction to show what the library ISN’T like! Another video we might use is this one – I went to University with the person who wrote the song in this clip (’Cursor Miner’). The video has the classic line ‘Librarians are often sexy’, so obviously that one could also be a debating point with new students…

Annette Crosbourne of Highbury College then talked about effective LRC use of Moodle at the college. VLEs have obvious uses for the lecturers, but sometimes it is less clear how an LRC can use them, so this was an interesting case study.

The evening involved exploring Gunwharf Quays; chatting with my colleagues; and sampling food, lager, and some fine whiskies.

[LTRG after hours - photos courtesy of Lis]

Tuesday 18th July

This day was given over more to discussion of various LTRG issues and relevant resources and tools. Lis and I gave a brief talk about Services Supporting Learning in Wales: A Quality Toolkit for Evaluating Learning Resource Services in Further Education Colleges (link). We discussed the background and how the quality toolkit has been used in Wales (advocacy, benchmarking, inspections and so on). Although the toolkit was created for self-evaluation, the next step in the development of the toolkit was a Peer Evaluation scheme, which has been trialled and is due to become more widespread across Wales in the near future. Basically one or two professionally qualified librarians from other colleges come and evaluate your service (operating on a reciprocal basis whereby you then agree to participate in the assessment of someone else’s service). Peer evaluation is becoming seen as an important counterpart to benchmarking, valued by assessors, so this is an exciting development.

Following the meeting Lis and I got two trains back to Swansea with no trouble; and after a quick meal at The Retreat, I got the bus back to Aberystwyth – home for 10.30pm!

[Me using a 'powerball' after the meeting - photo courtesy of Lis]