The SeamlessAccess Outreach Committee recently conducted surveys of academic IT and library staff to better understand the issues around implementation of federated authentication.

The overall results indicate that there is room for improvement in the communications between academic libraries and their institutional IT departments.

While the surveys were developed to inform our outreach activities, we believe the results will be of interest to the wider community and are sharing our findings. Research questions addressed in the surveys include:

• How many libraries have implemented federated authentication for library resources?
• How well do libraries and IT understand federated authentication?
• How well do libraries and IT communicate about federated authentication?
• How much do libraries and IT know about the NISO RA21 recommendation?

Responses were received from 290 library and IT professionals.

We encourage readers to download our Summary of Findings (9 pages) and explore the results themselves. This document includes information about the survey methodology and response demographics, but comments from survey participants have been excluded to preserve anonymity.

If you have feedback or would like more information about these survey results, please contact SeamlessAccess at contact@SeamlessAccess.org.