Webinar: Making the business case. Why librarians are choosing federated single sign-on

Wednesday 24 May 2023
11 am EDT/ 5pm CEST

The global pandemic created irreversible and transformational change as many organizations across the world moved to a remote access model. Publishers and library organizations already using federated single sign-on were able to scale services to meet demand and focus on other aspects of library provision.

But organizations still reliant on IP-based access and VPN struggled to provide reliable, consistent access for library patrons. It became clear fairly early on that these older authentication technologies simply couldn’t keep up with demand, often falling over and failing to work.

Publishers and organizations alike need to make a major step change to ensure access remains secure, reliable, scalable and seamless. For federated authentication to be successful, library patrons expect a simple, seamless experience. User experience based on strong UX design and experience level agreements (XLAs) are no longer a nice to have. They are a necessity to safeguard content for the future and to compete against others that are already investing heavily in this area. The entire publishing industry is now at a point where it needs to serious consider its access business model.

We will discuss these issues with our panel of guest speakers:

Chair: Emma Wilson-Shaw, e-resources manager, OpenAthens

• Thomas Dowling, director of technologies, Wake Forest University, US and chair of ALA Federated Authentication Committee
• Jason Griffey, director of strategic initiatives, NISO and co-chair of the SeamlessAccess outreach committee
• Kelechi Okere, identity customer market segment director, health markets at Elsevier
• Hong Ma, head of library systems and interim associate dean of user services, Loyola University Chicago