RA21 - Resource Access for the 21st Century

[Chris Phillips]

Yes, a few of us from the R&E side are involved:  Leif Johanson, me, and a few others who have been part of our community for a long time.

>From my view as a participant in the RA21 activity it’s about answering this question:
 ‘What does a better and sustainable discovery experience look and feel like and what is needed to deliver it?’

Even though RA21 is looking at it through the lens of publishers, it’s not isolated to them. It will crop up in other places too like FIM4R’s next report BTW( https://fim4r.org)

Many in the R&E community have asked for better discovery for library tools and vendors – RA21  is this activity  but led not by ‘us’ but by the publishers and ultimately those who hold the operational burden of their choices in what they run.

Speaking of choice, one things we’ve done is provided a glimpse at what is already out there for tools. Here’s the list the group knows about: 
http://bit.ly/ds-env-scan  (google XLS doc, commenting open if you know of other solutions that should be on the list)

Shibboleth Consortium provides tools like the Embedded Discovery Service and features to support it.  Think of the RA21 activity as possible inputs to feature enhancements to our tools. This is what I see as an author of tools and as a federation operator – an opportunity to enhance the services with our principles applied. 

There are a lot of simple things like improving MDUI to contain SOMETHING as opposed to nothing or minimally have a few hints in it that will go tremendously further.  

Are there privacy risks in some of the approaches RA21 is exploring?  Possibly. These have been raised as artefacts/qualities of certain approaches RA21 is looking at. Things like GDPR and operating a highly reliable service are front of mind of some (a good thing). 

Which ‘way’ RA21 goes for me is a set of requirements and needs for this community for federated id discovery at very least. Some may see it as more.

What one does with these requirements is an interesting question. 

My hypothesis is that many of the existing Discovery Service solutions have a great deal of coverage already (north of 90%) and only a fraction of missing items. The missing items are not just software but data (e.g. MDUI).  This gap can’t be addressed by software but by federation operators and eduGAIN practices and policies to level up the data quality in our metadata.

Comments and thoughts welcome as always..

C


On 2017-11-30, 6:08 AM, "users on behalf of Peter Schober" <users-bounces at shibboleth.net on behalf of peter.schober at univie.ac.at> wrote:

    * Manuel Haim <haim at hrz.uni-marburg.de> [2017-11-30 10:10]:
    > Does anybody have an idea in which direction RA21 goes?
    
    FWIW, there are least two members from our (R&E) community acitvely
    engaged within RA21.
    
    -peter
    -- 
    For Consortium Member technical support, see https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/x/coFAAg
    To unsubscribe from this list send an email to users-unsubscribe at shibboleth.net
    
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