On 22-Mar-07, at 22:09 , William Denton wrote:
Say I live in Lower Mowat but one day I'm in Upper Mowat, in the next municipality (or county, or whatever) over, visiting my tailor. The two library systems are separate but share their resources. I pop into the library to update my Twittering friends on my inseam measurement. I don't actually have an account at the Upper Mowat Library, but I log in to one of their computers using my Lower Mowat-supplied OpenID identifier, and the Upper Mowat system recognizes where I'm from and gives me access to everything.
Bill, this sounds intriguing. The hard part of this process will be federating the patron databases into the OpenID framework. Right now some ILSs support querying an external LDAP server to authenticate patrons (III does this for logging in to the opac to place holds, for example), and some external systems support querying the patron database to authenticate (certain wireless access points and internet terminal management systems do this). So, when I walk in to my library and set up my library account, instead of them giving me a PIN with which to log in, I give them my OpenID (they might still give me a PIN, so people without OpenIDs can use the system, but I'll ignore it). Then, when I attempt to access services, I will select the "log in with my OpenID" option, it will pass off to the OpenID infrastructure, which will return 'aye' or 'nay', and then I'll be in, and the ILS will look up my authenticated OpenID in the patron database to find out how much money I owe in fines. It's not clear to me that NCIP comes in to the process, since that's a different (very heavy) way of passing authentication information around that I don't think fits well with the OpenID framework, but that something that I've have to look deeper into. - David -- David J. Fiander Digital Services Librarian
