1) Present
University of Bath
Edward Zedlewski - Director of NISS

University of Edinburgh (JCMB):
Martin Morrey - Remote Sensing                     Kim Underwood - UMI Administrator
Jean Ritchie - UMI Coordinator

University of Paisley
Ian Maclaren - Remote Sensing                       Patrick Walder - Remote Sensing
John McQuillan - Remote Sensing
 
University of Glasgow
Margaret Brown - MANTCHI

University of Strathclyde
Lorna Campbell - CVU                                  Dave Whittington - CVU
David McNicol - CVU

University of St Andrews
Collin Allison - FINESSE

2. Report from Jean Ritchie
2.1 JR Attended a TALiSMAN seminar on using Videoconferencing for Teaching and Learning. It included a very interesting demo of NetMeeting from Rachel Dunwell, Heriot-Watt University. Rachel showed a web page ‘over the air’; then each site left the VC room and sat at PCs, and provided answers to a series of problems (successive values for diameters of circles for agreed Pythagorean Triples). When anyone got a value, they could enter it in a communal table. 5 minutes later the conference restarted and participants were able to see each other’s figures on the web page, and together derive the formula for deriving the diameter of the circle.

Rachel’s email is R.M.Dunwell@ma.hw.ac.uk

2.2 JR had a holiday at Easter so nothing else to report

3. JR asked if UMI 2 projects had anything in particular they wanted to report. Projects had nothing new to report.

4. Discussion with Ed Zedlewski (Director, NISS) about the ATHENS system
4.1 Ed Zedlewski gave a short presentation on the ATHENS system, covering:
What is ATHENS?
a. Resource Access Management System
b. User Authentication Service

Design features - single password sign-on to multiple resources
- distributed management for user accounts
- supports very large numbers of users and resources
- authenticates via WWW, telnet, proprietary client/ server technology
 
Users of ATHENS

Users - staff and students - UK HE (1.7 million population)
Domain or department administrators
Data Service Providers (DSP) - NISS, BIDS

ATHENS agent contacts account server; looks in local ATHENS database for username, password, IP address, and corresponding resource ID

All HE UK sites are now using ATHENS
NHS and FE sites are starting to use ATHENS

4.2.1 There are currently two account servers and 2 more are being commissioned, to be based in Edinburgh and London. Accounts are replicated on all servers.

4.2.2 ATHENS can restrict access to certain materials at certain times for certain users; this is done by using the "user profile function" which has two different profiles - resource level profile and global profile.

The resource level profile would be used:

Users can store preferences.
Service can store settings for each user, including when that user is entitled to access certain resources. This would be necessary for MANTCHI who want to release materials at certain times during a course.

4.2.3 EZ guessed that approximately 40 - 50 % of UK HE students will have a personal ATHENS account within 3 - 4 years.

In the past, sites have used shared access accounts; there is now a move to personal accounts; some services eg EDINA insist that personal accounts are used. Other services eg BIDS don’t check IP address for personal accounts - so the account can be used from anywhere.

4.2.4 Would switching to ATHENS reduce a project’s user base in the immediate future if only people with an ATHENS password can access the materials? CVU currently has 5 thousand users and doesn’t want to lose them.

EZ said it would probably take 1 - 2 days to set up an ATHENS service. ATHENS can run in parallel with another service, and therefore the move to an exclusively ATHENS service can be done gradually. Usernames would need to be changed - passwords from other systems can't be re-used as all ATHENS passwords have a site code prefix. ATHENS usernames can be up to eight characters, the first three being the institution code, and the last five being organised by the domain administrator to represent a particular user etc. In the near future, ATHENS usernames will be able to contain up to 20 characters. EZ said the best time to register would be by the start of this, or next, academic year. All JISC Data Centres now use ATHENS and other JISC services requiring authentication services are also strongly encouraged to use ATHENS.

4.2.5 The next step for UMI projects to make use of ATHENS is to register by filling out a form on the ATHENS web page at http://www.athens.ac.uk/dsp. There is an annual charge of £2000 which covers access to the ATHENS software and 24 hour support.

4.2.6 EZ said that it might be possible for UMI projects to band together to nominate a small number of people who would handle all contacts with ATHENS; ATHENS might then offer a reduced price. In effect UMI would try to appear to ATHENS as a single, or smaller number of, DSP. In a similar way, AHDS has five satellite services and one primary gateway to ATHENS.

4.2.7 Projects agreed to discuss via email whether it is thought that ATHENS could be useful for UMI projects. If it is decided that ATHENS may be a useful service for UMI, EZ needs to know information such as which services projects are currently using, and what they plan to use in the future so he can work out a price.

                                                                                                                            Action All
 
5. AOB
5.1 Brian Kelly, just back from the WWW conference in Australia, would be speaking at the next UMI meeting on 11th May.
 
5.2 Paul Clark will speak at a future UMI meeting. There were no new suggestions for speakers.