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ProQuest announces Shibboleth support for ProQuest platform |
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9 February 2009 |
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ProQuest has announced that all products hosted on the ProQuest platform (from ABI/INFORM, Research Library and ProQuest Central to historical and current newspapers, ProQuest Medical Library and Entrepreneurship) are now Shibboleth compliant, affirming ProQuest's commitment to working with emerging library standards. The Shibboleth System (a trademark of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development) is an increasingly popular standards-based, open source software package for web single sign-on, allowing library sites to make informed authorisation decisions for individual access of protected online resources.
ProQuest's Shibboleth release provides support for the following federations; the United States (InCommon), Canada (The Canadian Access Federation), United Kingdom (The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research) and Germany (DFN-AAI). Other federations will be supported at a later date.
"We embrace the new Shibboleth technology in easing access to resources to make a more streamlined experience for the user as well as assisting information professionals in the complex area of identity management," said Mary Sauer-Games, Vice President, Higher Education Publishing, ProQuest. "We are pleased to support these innovative national federations and look forward to supporting even more federations in this enterprise in the future."
Shibboleth overcomes the complexity of managing passwords, as well as the challenges associated with authentication technologies (such as IP authentication and Athens), enabling single sign-on and federated administration of access to restricted resources. The user's site and the target site exchange information based on attributes (for example a student in a particular course, or a particular faculty member). This approach allows for more active privacy management than relying solely on the unique identity of the user, reducing the workload for information professionals in managing user identities, and providing a more uniform experience for the user.
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