UK Federation Gains Shibboleth access to FirstSearch

Now members of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research can gain access to FirstSearch, OCLC’s database aggregation service, through Shibboleth.

Shibboleth defines a common framework for access management that is being adopted by education and commercial sectors across the world.

If you are a registered Federation member and wish to take advantage of FirstSearch through Shibboleth, you will need to first set up OCLC as an Identity Provider. The OCLC Service Provider entity ID is defined in the ukfederation-metadata.xml file as: entityID="https://shib.oclc.org/shibboleth".

Then contact OCLC UK Support to:

• Inform OCLC which Identity Provider entityID to use
• Request a FirstSearch authorization or specify which existing FirstSearch authorization is to be used. OCLC requires the eduPersonEntitlement attribute to specify which FirstSearch authorization to use. The entitlement string value to configure is: urn:mace:oclc.org:FirstSearchAuthorization.

Test the URL at: https://shib.oclc.org:2443/fs

For additional details on access options for FirstSearch, please see the related documentation.

The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research is supported by JISC and Becta, and operated by JANET(UK). The federation provides a single solution to access online resources and services for education and research.

OCLC supports the Shibboleth project.

(2009 04 16)