Mimas launches JISC Historic Books

Page last modified on 04 April 2012, at 05:21 PM (initially posted on 4 April 2012)

JISC Historic Books contains the page images, and full text where available, of thousands of 15th to 19th century books enabling users to cross search and download individual pages as well as whole books via a single easy-to-use interface.

Consolidating the early modern book collections licensed in perpetuity by JISC Collections on behalf of its members, as well as recently digitised 19th century content from the British Library, its meaning-based search technology offers a new way to discover contextual and conceptual relationships between historical materials.

JISC Historic Books is one of three platforms in the JISC eCollections service.

This service is available for subscription to UK HE, FE & research councils through JISC Collections.

WAYFless URL: http://jcolls.mimas.ac.uk/wayf?sso=<SSO_LOCATION>&destination=books

(where <SSO_LOCATION> is the URL of the single sign on service of the Identity Provider to use for authentication). See http://support.mimas.ac.uk/access/#federated-access-details for technical details.

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 affiliation 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.

While a Shibboleth identity provider can generate eduPersonScopedAffiliation statically by setting the required value in attribute-resolver.xml, this should only be done when it is known that all users are authorised. Otherwise, the value can be picked up from your LDAP / Active Directory as described on the IdP setup page.

Users of other IdP software should check their documentation.

2. Many services can make use of the eduPersonTargetedID attribute. This is a persistent opaque identifier, which enables service personalisation (remembering data about a user over different login sessions) without the service provider knowing who the user is. If the identity provider supplies the eduPersonTargetedID attribute, the session is treated similarly to an Athens personal account. Otherwise, the service's personalisation features (e.g., saved searches) may be disabled, though the service will still function in the same way as with Athens shared accounts. With some services (e.g., Zetoc Alert) this attribute is mandatory. If so, it is marked as "Required/Yes" in the table in Attribute Usage.

For a Shibboleth IdP, generation of eduPersonTargetedID in attribute-resolver.xml is described on the IdP setup page.

Release of eduPersonTargetedID by attribute-filter.xml is described further down the same page.

Users of other IdP software should check their documentation.