Access Management in Federated Digital Libraries

With the growth in digital libraries and standardization of protocols for metadata sharing, it is becoming feasible to build federated discovery services which aggregate metadata from different digital libraries (data providers) and provide a unified search interface to users. One of the obstacles that keep data providers, especially the commercial ones, from joining the federation is the lack of an infrastructure to support their business model. Commercial publishers are interested in sharing their metadata with a service provider if they can provide controlled access (who can see what) according to their business model. Driven by the need of commercial organizations (both for-profit and non-profit) to have controlled access to their digital objects and, furthermore, to have that control be inherited by aggregators that federate several contributing organizations, we have implemented a demonstration system based on Shibboleth, OAI-PMH, and XACML. Our system enables contributors to manage controlled access to their information to privileged users using a role-based policy editor. It enables aggregators to reduce their maintenance overhead of dynamic user communities by delegating authentication and credential management responsibility to authorization authorities of the users. Finally, it enables the end users to access information irrespective of their location. This is achieved by providing consistent quality of service irrespective of user location.