The intent of this post is to argue for federated identity as a mechanism for library access. The idea of federated identity is that individual institutions authenticate their own members, and then this authentication is shared across participating institutions - a federation - to provide member access to services offered by all of them. That sounds great, but of course what bothers me about this is the idea that people would need identity and authentication management (IAM) to access library services at all. The need is created by the existence of restricted access collections - commercial products that have granted libraries only limited licenses to share. But maybe this is beginning to change. "Scholars increasingly encounter content through open web pathways and AI-assisted discovery tools, rather than beginning within library-managed environments. Many authentication models still common across scholarly publishing are therefore increasingly misaligned with how research actually happens."
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