Opening the second day is Mark Tysom talking about the UK federation.

There are now 765 members of the UK federation, which has now been operating for 3 years. They now have:

• 74% of UK FE institutions
• 100% of UK HE institutions
• 57% of schools in England
• 100% of schools in Northern Ireland and Scotland

In this context ‘signup’ just means that they have agreed to the Federation rules – it doesn’t mean they are actively participating in the Federation.

Service Enhancements coming:

Details at http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/content/Documents/DevelopmentRoadMap. Today Mark is going to look at the next 6 months or so:

WAYF Review

• Provide and independent review of the current WAYF login processes
• Improve the usability and accessibility for all users and enhance the user experience
• Conduct user tests with a series of sites to assess the usability of the WAYF interface
• Identify any other direct enhancements to be made
• Provide prioritised recommendations for next steps and future development by end July 2010

They have engaged an external company to assess usability of the WAYF, getting evidence from talking to users, and observing how they interact with WAYFs/login. Clearly some crossover with studies such as Publisher Interface study – so they are sharing the outcomes of the study with these other projects.

Portal Best Practice

WAYF is a ‘backstop’ solution – i.e. not the preference. The UK Federation encourage the development of ‘portals’ – I’m not quite clear who they think will develop these ‘portals’ and why users will actually come to resources via portals – this just seems like a backward looking idea to me? Perhaps I’ve misunderstood?

Some clarfication on questioning – it seems that in this sense they mean the UK Federation WAYF as opposed to WAYF as a process generally. I think it is key we assume that users will hit resources from the open web rather than via a system controlled by the library or institution.

Statistics Gathering

• Provide mechanisms to all the operatiors of IdPs and the federation to visualise how the service is being used
• Provide mechanism to populat an anonymous central database that can store usage data for these services
• Review existing mechanisms for gathering federation metrics
• Incorporate solution into the JANET Netsight2 Service

Mark also mentioned they would be looking at Metadata scaling and running a Satisfaction Survey

Now Mark mentioning a couple of policy areas they are going to be looking at – Inter-federation agreements and Eligibility for membership – the latter looking at interest from other sectors such as NHS, Governments, Museums.