At Innovative Users Group 2005 Conference now. The most exciting thing today was Using LDAP Authentication by John Culshaw of University of Colorado at Boulder, and Richard Paladino of Innovative Interfaces. Despite the title, the raison d’etre of the presentation was single sign-on, and the unstated hurdle was identity management. Academic IT departments are struggling with these two huge issues, but libraries often have even more limited IT resources and are getting little help from campus IT departments.
I’m more and more convinced that we — academic libraries — need to participate in the larger academic IT space. There are some good opportunities to influence the direction of some emerging standards to suit library needs, and perhaps speed their development by providing clear usage scenarios.