Advice on the applicability of Shibboleth to our service

[Sean Naderi]

Hello,

I am co-founder and CTO of a London startup, and we are considering using
Shibboleth as our authentication service.

I just have a few questions related to our sites specific functionality,
and I apologise in advance if my question hints at general ignorance
towards the service Shibboleth offers.

Our website can be best described as a data aggregation service, making
many calls to different APIs and pooling them all together in a nice
package for our users. Our service is focused on university students and
recent graduates, and is aimed at career guidance and progression.

We want to provide our users with relevant academic journals/ papers of
research based upon their search criteria. Our initial attraction to
Shibboleth was the following: since universities have subscriptions that
allow users to access certain academic resources (from JSTOR and the like),
if a user signs on using their university credentials with our site, we
could then make api calls to these services as if it were a user making a
search on that particular service, if that makes sense.

I was wondering if this was at all possible, and if so how that might be
accomplished. To be clear, if a user signs on from a university X, and X
subscribed to academic journals provided by Y, could we then make API calls
on behalf of X to Y and show the result of this query on our site?

Thank you for your time!

Kind Regards,

Sean
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