A Distributed Authentication Infrastructure for Western Australian Universities

Abstract

The Western Australian Group of University Librarians (WAGUL) had identified the increasing diversity and cost of scholarly resources as having a major impact on the ability of university libraries to deliver those resources. Various avenues for the sharing of these resources were pursued as strategic objectives. One major impediment to this sharing was the need for reliable, automated interinstitutional authentication. WAGUL were successful in 2000 in obtaining a substantial grant from the Commonwealth Development Pool (CDP) to fund a major authentication project to address this strategic objective. The aim of the authentication project was a distributed authentication infrastructure for the five Western Australian Universities. The main components of the solution have now been implemented, and the technical feasibility demonstrated. It remains to populate the directories with live data, which it is expected will have be completed during 2003, and to begin using the distributed authentication infrastructure.