Hi,
At the National Library of Wales, we've got a hosted
cross-searching service (Summon by SerialSolutions) available
here:
http://llgc.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=
If you've logged into Shibboleth, you get a pretty seamless
experience, clicking through to the content you've discovered.
If you're not, users can get pretty lost.
Serialsolutions recommend ezproxy as the solution to this, and
that we proxy our logged-in users' access to the hosted search,
as their interface can easily detect whether a user is coming
from our proxyied or internal IPs, and if they're not (ie,
they're not logged into ezproxy) a banner can pop up advising
them to log in.
I'm not sold on ezproxy as a technical solution (I think it's
a good product, we have an installation to support the few
e-resources that we use that still haven't moved to shibboleth)
but I think it's a hack, when we have federated identitiy
management services in place that work fine with 90% of the
e-resources we offer.
But, the user experience in our particular setup isn't great.
So here's my questions:
* Anybody have a similar setup with shibboleth and how do you
manage it?
* what would it take for serialsolutions to be able to implement
a similar banner that detects whether the user has a shibboleth
session in place. I'm presuming they'd need to be an SP in
the UK Federation, but how much development would it be to just
implement the session detection? Anybody done something similar?
Hope I explained that well enough.
Thanks.
--
Illtud Daniel [log in to unmask]
Pennaeth TGCh Head of ICT
Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru National Library of Wales
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