As OpenAthens gains marketshare in the library authentication landscape, it has become highly likely, especially in consortial environments, that a library user may belong to 2 or more organizations that use OpenAthens as the primary means of authentication.
Users in this situation currently will experience frustration when attempting to "cross the streams" as it were...For example, a student might be ready an ebook provided by their university for research in their German language course. They suddenly remember that there is a unit in Mango languages that will help them, and instead of simply crossing over to their public library access point, they have to logout of everything, clear their cache and cookies or operate across multiple browsers.
For those patrons who might be a college faculty member, a public library patron, and an adjunct technical college professor, and a role in K-12 schools:
Possibilities:
--To aggregate all content a user has access in an OpenAthens provided portal, with multiple institutional tabs nd provide a single, magical authentication cookie recognized by all their providers across the patron's different institutions? Set access cookies for all sites at the same time at login?
--Could MyAthens plus be a place where a user could begin a multi-facted, multi-institutional user journey without cumbersome changes and re-authenticating?
--To work with vendors to create a means to route users based on multiple affiliations?
I do not posess the technical wherewithall to make this make sense, but i think it is well worth discussing ways to evolve the service and all vendor services to provide a more seamless user experience to those with rights to utilize multiple streams of content with OA auth.
