The scope of the workshops and the associated briefing material assumed that federated access management is a requirement for repositories; it did not infer this as a solution to previously-identified requirements. This assumption was made by JISC as a pragmatic approach to developing a tentative programme of work, which will be subject to further iterative development.
The aim of the workshops is to identify scenarios related to teaching, research and administration, in which repositories are involved and where access management is an issue; and then to gain feedback from people experienced in FAM and repositories about the issues raised.
The November workshop 2008 in particular aims to prioritise the scenarios with a view to future funding programmes by JISC, taking into account criteria such as:
importance and urgency, feasibility of implementation, and whether solutions are better implemented within or beyond the scope of the federation. In addition, various projects are looking at issues of federated access management, some developing software, others looking at procedures and policies. These projects do not all address repositories in the narrow sense; they do, however, address in various contexts issues that are as relevant to repositories as they are to other resource providers, and the solutions that they develop applicable in repository contexts. It is useful to consider how we can make best use of the results of this work, and determine which outputs are usable, sustainable, open, standards-conformant, of high quality, generalisable, and so forth. In particular, some projects produce a solution by getting round a restriction imposed by the federation, which leads to consider not only what can be achieved within the federation as it currently stands, but also how requirements arising from the demands of repositories may influence the direction of the federation of the future.
A report on the results of these consultations is currently being published by JISC and will come put soon in 2009. Watch this space!
