Upcoming Events

If you’re interested in a different perspective on federation, education, and research, GÉANT’s TNC21 conference, June 21-25, is always a great source of information. It is also free and entirely virtual this year. More information is available at https://tnc21.geant.org/.

ALA Annual runs from June 23-29, and always has excellent content for the library community. This year, Jason Griffey (NISO) and John Felts (Coastal Carolina University) are presenting a case study on SeamlessAccess to show how one library has approached the use of federated identity as part of their services.

Sharing the User Experience Research

Best practice guidance from SeamlessAccess comes from research into what users find most useful. We share that guidance with the community in the hopes that others will find it useful as they design their own federated authentication workflows. Most recently, we have completed and published a Click Test Research Report which presents the results of user experience tests across four different sites, focusing on what worked (and what did not) in helping the user through the workflow. See more on our User Research Insights documentation page (scroll down to the Click Test Research report at the bottom).

The SeamlessAccess Product Roadmap

Work on SeamlessAccess is an ever-evolving set of activities. Over the next few months, we expect several features to be released, including progressive scrolling on the Standard IdP discovery page and various internationalization improvements. Much of our planning and development work is focused on improving how we signal to a user that a given IdP is more or less likely to work with a given service provider. Below is a copy of our roadmap, which shares our goals and target dates (though the target dates will likely change as real-world activities impact our efforts). We will keep you informed via the newsletter as new features are released!

SeamlessAccess.org is a service designed to help streamline the online access experience for researchers using scholarly collaboration tools, information resources, and shared research infrastructure. This service is governed as a coalition between four organizations: GÉANT, Internet2, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and the International Association of STM Publishers. Participants include researchers, service providers, libraries, identity providers, and federation operators. We’re excited to bring you up to date on the latest news.