Championing secure, seamless access: Inside the world of our Athenian ambassadors
Our Athenian ambassadors are leaders in the global library community - pioneering, senior librarians with a mission to support seamless discovery journeys and better learning and research outcomes. We asked a few to share their experiences and insights.
Craig Amos - associate dean for library access and discovery services, Broward College, Florida, USA
In his 26-year career Craig has worked in five different institutions. Today he leads on technical services, archives and special collections, collection development and web development across Broward’s libraries.
Broward benefits from Florida Virtual Library (FLVC)’s centralized library system, which provides OpenAthens Compass and the Reporting API tool to all the state’s public colleges and universities.
"We were one of the state's early adopters, moving from EZproxy to OpenAthens in 2020."
“It has eliminated all the hitches we had before, now users don’t notice the authentication layer at all and that’s the beauty of it, it’s seamless. We’ve done outreach with resource vendors to get them on board.”
Discovery journeys are much improved and so, too, are the processes for managing licensing. The FLVC consortium has built a crawler that gathers OpenAthens’ usage data and it updates automatically every six hours, which means license agreements are very closely controlled and reported accurately via a dashboard in Power BI.
As an Athenian ambassador, Craig has kindly agreed to speak to us for this case study. But he’s no stranger to advocating for federated single sign-on and for OpenAthens in particular.
To that end, he’s been working with sister institutions to discuss their authentication issues and, recently, he’s worked with some private institutions outside the FLVC agreement. As a result, these are in the process of joining the OpenAthens Federation.
"It's light years better than what we had before so we're really just sharing something that we know works."
Athena Hoeppner - discovery services librarian, University of Central Florida (UCF), USA
Throughout Athena’s 30 years in UCF Libraries she has championed the power of library technologies to enhance search, access and authentication, and promoted the importance of library-vendor partnerships in supporting better learning and research outcomes. As an Athenian ambassador she has spoken about her experiences with OpenAthens in webinars and other presentations.
Six or seven years ago, when FLVC started talking about a shared SAML-based authentication solution she advocated for it, because UCF Libraries were having a lot of issues with logins and access.
“Our previous access and authentication software didn’t have WAYFless access and deep linking built in, and it didn’t participate in the Seamless Access initiative. OpenAthens does."
"It's a much easier discovery experience for users who don't start from the library's home page, and for staff members, because they don't end up with resource links in their course materials that break later."
Lucy Roper - head of library services, University of the Built Environment (UBE), Reading, UK
Lucy has been solo librarian at UBE for 14 years. The university provides supported online programs, and she has spearheaded work to make sure its 4,000+ students – in 100 countries – have robust, seamless access to the highly specialized resources in its digital library. She is using her time as an Athenian to share best practice with other small, specialist libraries internationally.
At UBE, Lucy spearheaded an upgrade from a legacy MyAthens implementation to MyAthens+, which means she has been able to customize the library’s authentication system and consolidate its resources into one bespoke solution that supports discovery and learning.
"As a solo librarian, I also really value the efficiency savings I'm making. It's quick for me to create accounts in the dashboard and then to delete them when students graduate."
“Our students have a streamlined experience when they use the library, and I have reporting options that mean I can export graphs and metrics easily for budget planning and board reports. The world map function is an excellent way to show the global reach that our resources now have.”
Future challenges
So what do our Athenians see as future challenges for information professionals?
Three linked topics came up:
- Funding cuts and budget pressures
- Traditional vendors being bought out and discontinuing or altering their resource offers
- AI-generated search results in commercial search engines such as Google
“OpenAthens is helping with all these challenges, for sure,” says Craig Amos.
"We can rely on exact counts through OpenAthens reporting to demonstrate value and help us make informed decisions. We aren't reliant on vendor statistics."
Athena Hoeppner highlighted another issue: what will supersede SAML-based authentication – and when?
This is a big unknown, but at OpenAthens we’re collaborating on international initiatives to answer the question. We don’t think there will be big changes any time soon, but whatever technology comes next, whether it’s OpenID Connect (OIDC), Federated Credential Management (FedCM) or something else, we’ll be ready with a solution for our customers.
Meet all of our Athenians!
The Athenians are our international librarian ambassadors with top-quality knowledge and experience within the industry. Together, we’re sharing their insights as well as their experiences of how OpenAthens has benefited them and their library over the years.