Dear all,
I wonder if those of you who are already using the Federation gateways to
provide Shib access to e-resources, would mind sharing your experiences
with the London School of Economics.
LSE was one of the first institutions to start testing the Gateways. When
we started testing our Gateway-compliant resources, it appeared that a
persistent cookie was set when a user accessed a Gateway resource, so that
if the user then went to access a non-gateway compliant resource, he would
still be directed to the Gateway WAYF, not Classic Athens. Because some
key LSE resources were non-gateway compliant (e.g. Westlaw), that wasn't
an option for us. Eventually Eduserv suggested using TRLs (their
persistent URLs) to overcome the problem. There are two types of TRLs that
can be used - one for gateway compliant resources (sets a single session
cookie) and one for non-compliant (doesn't set the cookie). This solved
the 'cookie' issue but created a new one in that TRLs can only be used for
top-level URLs (eg a database homepage), and not individual journals, and
LSE provides access to both.
My questions are:
1) Have you used/ are you using TRLs?
2) If you have to provide Gateway access at journal title level, how do
you do that (LSE uses Serials Solutions to provide access to individual
journals, so any examples of Gateway use with SS would be particularly
welcome!)
3) If you provide access for walk-in users, how do you display resource
links for users (ie separate them from the 'shib'/gateway links).
Many thanks in advance,
Masha Garibyan
LSE Library Projects Team
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