New service from EBSCO Publishing

Posted on Wednesday, 29 August 2007

Approximately 250 full text and abstract & index databases from Archaeology to Zoology, serving the academic community with collections including: Academic Search Complete, Business Source Complete, Communications and Mass Media Complete, Computer and Applied Sciences Complete, International Bibliography of Theatre and Dance with Full Text, Film and Television Literature Index with Full text, RILM, RIPM.

The Medical community databases include Biomedical Reference Collection, CINAHL with Full Text, Cochrane Collection Plus, DynaMed, Medline with Full Text, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, PsycBOOKS, PsycEXTRA, PsycCRITIQUES, SPORTDiscus with Full Text.

Notes:

1. The only attribute that an identity provider must release for its users to be able to access many services that are licensed for use by everyone at a particular organisation is eduPersonScopedAffiliation. This is a scoped attribute, which might, for example, have the value "member" in scope "uni.ac.uk", often written as:

It is used for the basic authorisation decision: does uni.ac.uk subscribe to the service in question? If so, the user is allowed access. The service provider will maintain its own list of which organisations (scopes) can access its service. For allowed organisations, the federation's Technical Recommendations for Participants indicate that, in HE/FE, users with scoped affilitation values from the set {member, student, staff, faculty, employee} are typically authorised to access content licensed on the basis of the JISC Model Licence, while {affiliate, alum} are not.

An identity provider can generate eduPersonScopedAffiliation automatically (without an attribute store) by setting the required scope in resolver.xml, as described in SetupIdP.

7. EBSCO have recommended customers to contact their federation for the required attribute configuration. For the UK federation, first ensure that your identity provider releases eduPersonScopedAffiliation (ePSA) to the EBSCO SP as in the example "EBSCOHost service" <Rule> under Attribute Release below. Then go to EBSCO's online customer administration system (EBSCOadmin), select the "UK Higher Education" region, go to the "Shibboleth" configuration tab, ignore the "Shibboleth Entitlement" field and in the "Shibboleth Affiliation" field enter something like member@xxx.ac.uk, where xxx.ac.uk is the scope for your organisation. If your IdP will assert a value other than member (e.g., "student") then use that. If you are not already familiar with EBSCOadmin then EBSCO customer support may be willing to make these changes on your behalf.