On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Nicole Harris wrote:

> You might not want to make them 
> a member of the organisation though.   The other way of distinguishing them 
> might be to make use of the flexibility of the scope - so to have 
> [log in to unmask] for the specific course that teaches 
> external students.

I've been discussing with the UK federation Help Desk the idea of using 
[log in to unmask] (or something similar) as a way of identifying those 
members of the University of Cambridge who are entitled to access to the 
bulk of our library-style electronic resources - for various internal 
reasons it is difficult for us to use [log in to unmask] for this at the 
moment. The federation recommend that I don't do this, mainly on the 
grounds that doing so would be unusual, but also because I'd be using 
scope as a way of generating what amounts to new affiliation values. I 
understand this advice, though I'm on the verge of ignoring it.

> There does need to be more work with the publishers though to ensure that the 
> attributes they are willing to accept (often minimum) don't clash with the 
> requirements in their licenses.  I'm not sure this correlation is being made 
> as fully as it could be.

I think this is very true, and more work in this area would be very 
useful. This is exactly why the impending demise of the JISC Access 
Management Team, and so the publisher support project, (see other mail 
from Nicole) is probably misguided. I have for a long time been concerned 
that different suppliers will in effect assume mutually incompatible 
definitions of for example [log in to unmask] without fully appreciating 
that isn't how things work.

Jon.

-- 
Jon Warbrick
Web/News Development, Computing Service, University of Cambridge