EDINA newsline
June 2008: Volume 13 Issue 2
Changes will be made to the way institutions, their staff and students access EDINA services from 1 August 2008 onwards, as indicated in the previous edition of Newsline (March 2008).
We have since issued a series of alerts for EDINA support staff and on the EDINA website. What follows is a summary of the current position – for the most up-to-date information, check the web links provided at the foot of this article.
From 1 August 2008, EDINA will no longer provide an Athens login button for the following services:
In line with JISC policy, access to its services at the JISC national data centres will be via the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research (‘the UK federation’). For its part, EDINA is enabling federated (Shibboleth) access for all the services listed above. Most are now in place; the rest will be so by 31 July 2008, with some services providing ‘campus access’ via recognition of institutional IP addresses.
For Shibboleth access to EDINA services, your institution will need to join the UK federation. The common solutions are either in-house deployment, or paying for an outsourcing service such as OpenAthens.
JISC provides advice on the choice of technical solutions for joining the federation, the link for which is available at http://edina.ac.uk/access/
Access to some services such as Digimap, and for some purposes Jorum, is only possible if a user’s institution declares that it offers ‘user accountability’. This provides assurance to a Service Provider (such as EDINA) that the end-user involved in a particular transaction can always be associated with an actual person.
Some services allow each individual user to retain information across different sessions. This normally works through each user’s access management account; the recent changes have put this continuity of user personalisation at risk. EDINA staff have been investigating ways to mitigate these risks for services which allow a user to save searches (Land, Life & Leisure and CAB Abstracts), to create a personal album (Education Image Gallery), or to use the map chest (Digimap). Guidance for users is being given on the login page for each service.
For Digimap, eg, each user is being provided with the means to link the Athens-based account to the new account created through UK federation access. If you subscribe to Digimap, you should read the Digimap access article in this issue.
Enquiries should be sent to the EDINA helpdesk.