On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 10:13, Walter Lewis wrote:

> At the risk of changing the subject line, I'm curious if anyone has
> solved the problem of remote authentication cookies in the context of
> this class of parallel federated searching.

Sorry for the delay...

We haven't solved it.  We have a servlet that takes the query and spawns
a thread for each engine it wants to query.  It gathers the results in a
results list and then post-processes (filters) them (renames resources,
sorts, categories, etc).  What the patron gets is a list of resources
arranged by category with a hit count for each resource (some engines,
like SKOLAR.com, provide multiple resources and simplify the problem of
remote authentication by doing it for us once).  We are fortunate that
many of our resources do do IP authentication or are provided in the
context of an aggregator, like SKOLAR.  We have a few though that, when
the patron clicks on the link next to a hit count, will require that
s/he login (MD Consult for instance).  Solving cookies would solve that
but I think we decided we didn't want to solve that problem because MD
Consult would not like, and perhaps not allow, us to allow patrons to
bypass their authentication (maybe this is just defining the problem
away).  Once the patron logs in, though, s/he is taken directly to the
results of the search.  We are approaching early testing so will see if
patrons like this or not...

I too am interested in hearing if others have solved the cookie problem.

Kevin

--
Kevin S. Clarke ([log in to unmask])
Digital Information Systems Developer
Lane Medical Library, Stanford University