Implementing Shibboleth: Two perspectives

Lech Wojtowicz
EBSCO Publishing

Glen Newton
CISTI, NRC

Abstract
View Newton's presentation
View Wojtowicz's presentation

Shibboleth, a project of Internet2/MACE, is developing architectures, policy structures, practical technologies, and an open source implementation to support inter-institutional sharing of web resources subject to access controls. If implemented widely, it has the potential to replace IP address validation as the primary means of authenticating library users for remote database access. In this session, two implementors will discuss their experiences with Shibboleth.

Shibboleth at CISTI: Introducing, prototyping and extending
Authors: Glen Newton [presenter] (Head research, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), National Research Council (NRC), David Dearman (Dalhousie University) Carolyn Brown (Manager, Journals Program NRC Research Press, CISTI, NRC)
As both a publisher and consumer of electronic resources, the Shibboleth project is of great interest to CISTI. An overview of Shibboleth's structure and functionality will be given, along with a discussion of the recent work done at CISTI implementing the NRC Research Press prototype. The process of implementing the prototype not only brought CISTI's Research group deeper into the Shibboleth project but resulted in CISTI producing and contributing code which has become part of Shibboleth's code base.

Implementing Shibboleth: A Content Provider's Perspective
EBSCO Publishing has been involved with the Shibboleth project for the past two years and was one of the first content providers involved in live Shibboleth tests. This talk will share their experiences in implementing Shibboleth as well as their perceptions on how well Shibboleth can meet the goal of seamless single sign-on for our academic customers. Issues discussed will range from the implementation of the technology, aligning the user with groups or departments level accounts for a given institution, handling multiple link-in options and determining when a user is authenticated via Shibboleth.


Bios

Glen Newton is Program Head, Research - Information Technologies, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI), National Research Council (NRC). In the past, Glen has worked at the National Atlas, Natural Resources Canada, where he was responsible for putting the first interactive online GIS on the Web in 1994. He won the Canadian Internet Award in 1995 for best educational site, and subsequently spent several years working in private industry. His interests include OO design and programming, distributed object technology, Open Source software, agent technology, electronic (scientific) publishing, ECommerce, collaborative environments, databases, GIS, AI, information sciences, open archives and Web standards. He has been the NRC W3C representative and one of its CNI representatives for the last several years.


Lech Wojtowicz is Director of Software Development for EBSCO Publishing. He holds a master's degree in Applied Mathematics and has 20 years of experience in design and implementation of computer systems and applications, with the last 12 years in the area of Search and Retrieval Systems. He is currently overseeing the efforts of four development groups responsible for various aspects of the EBSCOhost system.