Today, the Alliance is co-hosting a Shibboleth InstallFest with CHECO, the Colorado Higher Education Computing Organization. Currently, there are 30+ IT personnel from Alliance and CHECO organization gathered around laptops in a classroom at DU. Nate Klingenstein from Internet2 is leading the Fest. Shibboleth is “open source, enterprise, federated, single sign-on software” that builds on SAML, Security Access Markup Language.
The Fest grew out of a combined interest in supporting federated authentication and authorization at the campuses as well as specifically within the Alliance Digital Repository service. There is a mix of library and central IT personnel participating today, and this Fest is one part of an emerging collaboration among library and IT staff.
Shibboleth is one form of authentication, along with LDAP, that is currently being investigated and – hopefully after today – prototyped among Alliance institutions. It relies on attributes, SAML, metadata at a more technical level and ultimately an understanding of identity management on each campus. This is new territory for many of our library member representatives. As a related activity, Alliance members have been encouraged to think about roles and workflows within the repository and generate a matrix and use cases to help support the discussion with IT staff.
Nate’s slides will be available shortly from the CHECO Web site (I will update the link here)
Many thanks to Chad Burnham, Nate Klingenstein (who’s T-Shirt provided the title of this blog post), and CHECO for organizing and supporting this event.