Attending: Jim, Oliver, Maureen, Laura, Martha, Pat, Michael (minutes). Guest: Jesse Koennecke.

1. News

Oliver said that Cornell’s part of the ARL survey on public computing has been submitted. He selected Olin, Uris & Kroch as examples for the survey for consistency of responses to the survey, but he added notes to show that it does not represent the magnitude of the public computing footprint at CUL.

PCAC membership and unit representation: Martha said that she is not the EMPSL liaison; we should ask Annemarie if this is her area. Jim is a Public Services representative; he asked that he contact/represent IT for JGSM & Hotel. Pat asked about the Subject Libraries Group (SLG). Martha explained that some of them are subject libraries, some are college department libraries (basically everyone that reported to Pat Schafer except Kroch Asia).

2. The minutes of the last meeting are on the PCAC wiki. They will be read & approved by members via email.

Discussion topics:

3. PCAC goals for PSEC:

Reference instant messenger

Jim said that there is discussion of a pilot project at ILR to set up a Reference instant messenger that runs on the public computers in the library. This would be a desktop widget that uses something like Webo. Maureen said that Virginia Cole would probably like to hear about this development. Oliver said that such a service could probably be masked or firewalled to keep the service hidden from outsiders. ILR uses Active Desktop.

CUL Public Computing policy

We need to decide how to post & disseminate the CUL Public Computing policy. Maureen will post the final version to the Gateway policy page. The final version is located at http://wiki.library.cornell.edu/wiki/x/aoM.

PCAC Open Forum

Everyone agreed that we should host another PCAC Open Forum for all of CUL. The theme of this one could be about desktop log-ins. The log-in issue was debated at one of the first PCAC meetings a few years ago but no consensus was reached. The cons are primarily security and privacy related issues; some of the pros include printing, drive space, library services, etc. Jim said the Statutory side would need to accommodate for walk-in non-CU people. Pat said PSEC has funds for standing committee goals ($500) which could help with food/drink at the event.

4. Single sign-on authentication in the Catalog

Jesse Koennecke joined us to discuss the Get It team's goals, which have been to streamline and simplify request and delivery services on campus. This includes book delivery requests, Borrow Direct, ILLIAD, etc. Authentication is a key issue for all of these, there are 4 different authentication methods: NetID/Kerberos, Voyager ID, ILLIAD username/password, CU ID for Borrow Direct. The goal is that 30,000 of our valid users should have a NetID. Some users should get into patron specific functions of the catalog without a NetID (they can use their CU ID number). Only a few hundred have the “floppy cards” that fall into that last category. The default approach is to use NetID/password (or CU ID) to get into these systems for anything that requires the system to know who they are. If they are successfully credentialed, they get into their account.

In the Catalog Test System (http://catalog-unicode.library.cornell.edu) you get the traditional library login screen plus one that asks if you want to use NetID/password. Jesse said that we want to use this approach because users ask why they can't use one username/password to get into everything. This kind of approach streamlines the whole experience for the user because different systems can “know” that the same person needs to do something, instead of having several different systems with different ID's for the same person.

The system will check for Sidecar first; if not detected, it uses CUWebAuth instead. He said a Shibboleth approach is being investigated.