Quick update

I’ve not blogged in a little while so I thought I’d give an update on what is happening with Linkey.

First I’ve been working with Paul in the library to capture (videos and screenshots) examples of poor user experience accessing various resources including electronic journals and databases, printers, and users’ library accounts.

I’ve also been trawling through last year’s NSS results to find examples of where students particularly struggled to access IT and library resources. I will then produce visualisations of these.

It is important to capture these examples so that hopefully by the end of the project we can show how we’ve improved the situation.

This week we launched our Ezproxy service [note: requires authentication] which has already improved accessing a number of resources including articles from the American Chemical Society, EBSCO Publishing and Oxford University Press.

I’ve also been working away at the new PHP OAuth library. Originally this was just going to be code for implementing an authentication server and a resource server, but now it is also going to include client code too thanks to Phil Sturgeon offering to integrate his existing code. As a result we’re going to have a lean and mean library that can help anyone work with any aspect of OAuth 2.