day 2 pm - "campus integration with today's technologies"

After the MRE, which I can honestly say was worse than I expected, I'm attending a session presented by Doug Randall and Betsy Graham, two of the presenters in the last session, on integrating Millennium products with services normally provided by campus ITS services. My institution recently implemented external patron verification, for the Griffin Millennium and Summit INN-Reach Web OPAC systems.

Doug Randall noted the "turnkey" nature of the authentication products that he's reviewing today, including:

• SSO (Millennium Web OPAC and other III systems, like WAM). SSO uses an Apache web server and III will work with campus SSO groups on the implementation details. For SSO, III has worked with (partial list of products/packages): IBM Tivoli Identity Manager; Pubcookie, and Sun Access Manager.
  
  Randall noted the importance of true SSO. This is a coming, important authentication challenge for the WSU Libraries, moving from universal sign-on to SSO.
  
  
• LDAP authentication. Randall noted that this has been a stepping stone to SSO. He's demoing the split screen that's been implemented at the WSU Libs.
  
  
• Courseware integration, with Blackboard or other CMS. Enables searching in Millennium, with all personalizations implemented. There appears to be a way to draw Blackboard information (course registration information) into Millennium records. This is intriguing. Graham made it clear that III is experienced in integrating with Blackboard systems.

All three of these products are described on this sheet (dated info).

In summary, the implementation of III's External Patron Verification at WSU went pretty smoothly, once we got the implementation's on III's schedule. The implementation had a very small impact on our production ILS or union catalog operations. We were also able to test some interface screen options using Web OPAC staging ports. (There were some limits to this, particularly for multi-institution systems, Summit INN-Reach and ARL ArticleReach.) And importantly, this implementation enables faster and easier access to library services for WSU students, faculty, and staff. The separate library login (epitomized thru the library PIN) is dead for the Griffin and Summit systems. This may make it harder to focus attention on the SSO issue, at least for a period of time.

This was a good, high-level discussion of automation options.

He concluded with a discussion on Patron web services and the ability to link Millennium system with campus enterprise systems such as PeopleSoft (Arizona State University) and Banner (University of Scranton). These are web services offered by the Millennium system to these ERP systems.