There is a widely encountered stipulation in contracts between educational institutions and licensed resource providers that people entitled to access the covered materials include faculty, staff, students and people who happen to be physically present in the library. Discussions with the Shibboleth community in the first half of 2006 led to an initial agreement to represent this as a particular value of eduPersonEntitlement: "urn:mace:dir:entitlement:common-lib-terms" (see http://middleware.internet2.edu/urn-mace/urn-mace-dir-entitlement.html).
This solution was based on the simple use case in which the Identity Provider in a transaction could be assumed to be the party in the licensee role. Since that time, more complex use cases have come into prominence. One of the most common is where an Identity Provider speaks for multiple subordinate institutions or units. Since the primary problem is how to make the licensee explicit, the shortest path for representing this would seem to be to use the existing attribute, eduPersonScopedAffiliation, with a new value, "library-walk-in." A licensed resource provider would know whether the stipulation applied by looking for affiliation values of "library-walk-in" or "member" (the union of "faculty," "staff," "employee" and "student)." To determine the licensee party, the resource provider would look at the scope, the string after the "@" sign in scoped eduPerson attributes.
MACE-Dir proposes to add "library-walk-in" to the controlled vocabulary for eduPersonAffiliation and eduPersonScopedAffiliation.
NOTE: Adopting this proposal would require changes to the eduPerson (200604) specification as follows:
In section 2.2.1, "eduPersonAffiliation" and section 2.2.6, "eduPersonPrimaryAffiliation" of the eduPerson (200604) specification,
Replace:
"Permissible values
faculty, student, staff, alum, member, affiliate, employee"
with:
"Permissible values
faculty, student, staff, alum, member, affiliate, employee, library-walk-in"
Insert after:
"'Affiliate' is intended to apply to people with whom the university has dealings, but to whom no general set of "community membership" privileges are extended."
The following new paragraph:
"'Library-walk-in:' This value is intended to facilitate the handling of a fairly widely encountered agreement between an institution and licensed resource providers that e-resources may be made accessible to students, faculty, staff and library walk-ins. This term originally indicated people who were physically present in a library facility. In recent years the library walk-in provision has been extended to cover other cases such as library users on the campus network, or those using on-campus workstations. Licensed resource providers have often been willing to interpret their contracts with licensees to accept this broader definition of 'library-walk-in,' though specific terms may vary. Under appropriate licensing terms, it is valid to assert an affiliation of 'library-walk-in" for members of this broader class of users. The affiliation 'library-walk-in' is independent of any other affiliation value. In other words, having the affiliation 'library-walk-in' has no effect, positive or negative, on any of the other defined affiliation values. Similarly, no other affiliation value implies or precludes the affiliation 'library-walk-in.'"