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When an electronic library resource has not recognised that you are a member of the University of Lincoln, you may be presented with an OpenAthens Authentication Point.

The steps below are describing what you would need to do to log in:-

1. Click on the “Alternative Login” link.

2.  Click on the “University of Lincoln” link. If you can’t see this link, try searching for University of Lincoln in the “Find your organisation” box.

3. Click on “Go to the University of Lincoln login page”

4. You would then need to put in your username (AccountID) and password. Please bear in mind that you may need to put network\ prefix in front of your AccountID.

We have been getting a number of enquiries related to OpenAthens login, some of which are as straightforward as the user not knowing what their OpenAthens username and password is. However, some of these enquiries are a bit more complicated.

For those who are new to OpenAthens, “OpenAthens” is one of the tools (or ways) we use authenticating our users when they access our electronic resources.

Within our e-resources team we tend to write blog posts with screenshots, step-by-step guides or presentations, which are all useful tools helping us dealing with enquiries. However on certain occasions, such as phone enquiries, it is better to have a visual material like a flow chart which gives clear and concise instructions to help to solve the problems in a relatively short amount of time. As a result of this, I have created a flow chart by using Lucidchart.

Lucidchart is quite a versatile collaborative tool for creating flow charts, mind maps and other diagrams that has integration to Google Drive (formerly known as Google Docs). You can create a free account to start using Lucidchart, but you would be limited to use 60 shapes. However, if you are member of a staff or a student in a university, you can open an educational account which comes with premium features free of charge.  If you had already opened a non-academic account previously, you can request an upgrade on here.

Creating a flowchart in a process I know quite well was not as easy as I thought it would be. Sometimes, it doesn’t help to know much on the topic as one may overlook certain steps or the layout of the process. It is always helpful to get the opinion of someone who looks at it with “fresh eyes”. After getting very useful feedback from my colleague Mandy from Customer Service Team and my line manager Paul Stainthorp, the version of the flowchart below has been finalised.

There will be a newer version of this flowchart coming up soon once we have upgraded to OpenAthens LA in the next few months.

We have been getting some enquiries from the students who are trying to register for student discounts on some retail websites. My colleague Paul Stainthorp wrote a detailed blog post about the list of such websites on here.

A number of our students are having problems registering with Unidays when it directs students to log in using Athens.

Her is a step-by-step help guide to overcome this problem.

1. Go to Unidays and click on “JOIN NOW”.

2.  Fill out the required fields (Please note that you don’t have to use your university email address) and click “Join Now”

3. Type “lincoln” in the “Select Your Institution” box and click on “University of Lincoln” from the drop-down list.

4. You are then directed to “Athens Login” page. Click on “Log in Using Athens”.

5. You would then reach “Authentication Point”. Click on the “Alternative Login” link.

6. Click on the “University of Lincoln” link. If you can’t see this link, try searching for University of Lincoln in the “Find your organisation” box.

7. Click on “Go to the University of Lincoln login page”

8. You would then need to put your username and password. Please bear in mind that you may need to put network\ prefix in front of your username.

9. At this point, if you haven’t used Athens before, you would reach “Open Athens Terms and Conditions of Use”. Choose “I accept these terms” and click on “Continue“.

10. You may see the error message “Invalid return URL specified”. Don’t worry about this message. Just close the Athens window and return to the Unidays website, and you should see that your registration has gone through.

We are looking in to changing the way we authenticate our users to access electronic resources at the University of Lincoln.

The first part of this project was introducing to launch EZProxy, the next stage will be upgrading Athens. Currently, we run Athens DA (running on the Portal) which we have been running for 8 years and it is time to upgrade something more modern that will integrate other systems better.

Eduserv who provides Athens DA have an up-to-date product which is OpenAthens LA 2.2.

Earlier this year, I went to the training at South Leicestershire College about how to configure OpenAthens LA to:

• “Categorise your users
• Define attributes based on available criteria
• Set up your attribute release policy
• Connect to both Athens & Shibboleth resource”

In this training, we covered Wayfless URLs, how OpenAthens can be used to release different user attributes to different library service providers, statistics and usage reporting and the differences between SAML (a standard protocol for authentication) and Shibboleth which is an identity provider software. However, people get confused with SAML and OpenAthens which is an IdP (Identity Provider) service which is also SAML compliant.

Here are some useful links on OpenAthens:

• OpenAthens LA 2.0 Introduction (Presentation slides)
• OpenAthens LA 2.2: Statistics (blog post by Eduserv)
• OpenAthens LA 2.2: Integrated Proxy (blog post by Eduserv)

Presently, we are waiting ICT Services to release a new server for us to install and configure OpenAthens LA. We will then look at what changes we need to make to our e-resources URLs- Wayfless or otherwise, how OpenAthens will relate to EZProxy and how all the different authentication systems fit together (Alex Bilbie is working on this integration under the Linkey project).