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