This subtasks deals with the pilots for Libraries.
The use case
- To date, many library resources like journals and tools are not accessible with an institutional account. To restrict access to such resources, libraries still rely on ip-address based access control
- Libraries need to maintain the correct ip-address ranges themselves but regard this approach as too labor intensive and inaccurate
- Users are confronted with inconsistent and confusing (if-this- than-that) user interfaces
- Often, citizen scientists are not affiliated with an institution and lack a verified institutional account to obtain access to restricted library sources
Proposed and piloted solutions to address these issues
- We established a proxy to be used by libraries to give access to restricted content no matter whether the (content) provider supports SAML or not. This approach is not new and offered as a solution called EZ-proxy but apparently many libraries are not aware of its existence
- By adding functionality to handle access requests from walk-in users (citizen scientists) we can kill two birds with one stone
- At the same time a proxy provides clues for "branding" of the access gateways e.g. the national library organisation...
This resulted in the following setup
A more detailed description of the first part of the pilot (SAML-IPaddress bridge) is available here: EZ proxy as Federated Access Mode Switch - Guide for Libraries
A description of the work that concerns the walk-in user topic is available here.