Within the Shibboleth Federation, there is a standard service called the WAYF (Where Are You From). Its role is to handle the case where a user (patron) browses directly to a content provider's website and attempts to sign on via Shibboleth. The content provider's website will invoke the WAYF service to discover what geographic location (country) and institution the user is associated with, and then redirect the user to the institution's Shibboleth identity provider to sign in.

The alternative use case that involves Serials Solutions services is when a user attempts to use a Serials Solutions discovery service (like the E-Journal Portal or 360 Search) and link into a Shibboleth-enabled content provider. In that case, the user first signs into the associated institutional Shibboleth identity provider at the time that they are accessing the Serials Solutions discovery service. Then the user clicks on a resulting link to a Shibboleth-enabled content provider. Library patrons frequently expect that they will seamlessly connect to the requested journal or article. Instead, frequently the user is prompted to go through the WAYF service and have to identify what institution they are associated with. Unfortunately, this is actually compliant with the Shibboleth standard (in other words, this is the correctly implemented behavior).

File attachments:

• Date Created: 9-Feb-2014
• Last Edited Date: 20-Feb-2014
• Old Article Number: 7492