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OpenAthens Ideas Portal

We're always looking for ways to improve our products, and we'd love your input to help us make that happen. Your suggestions will guide us in deciding where we should focus our future research and development.

Just sign in with your email to share your thoughts or vote for ideas you like—it'll help them get noticed!


Here’s how the portal is organised:

  • Librarians (Identity Providers): Share ideas that help organisations that manage user identities and provide access to online content and services. This includes improving the experience for students and researchers.

  • Publishers (Service Providers): Share ideas for organisations that offer content and services.


Guidance on using this portal

Status Feedback wanted
Workspace Librarians
Created by Guest
Created on Aug 7, 2025

Prioritize/Rank/Re-order OpenAthens Federation results in Wayfinder institutional discovery search

If an institution has membership in multiple federations (such as OpenAthens and InCommon), when a library patron searches for their institution name in an OpenAthens Wayfinder "Find your institution" search, they will see multiple results that all look similar. The user may not know which result to choose, and it is likely they will click the first result that appears.

But if the "correct" search result is buried underneath several irrelevant ones, then it is unlikely that the user will click it or even see it.

Please develop the ability to rank or prioritize a specific federation to the top of the Wayfinder results list.

For a specific example, the SP "The Economist" (https://www.economist.com/) uses the Wayfinder, and when a Harvard library patron searches for their institution by typing "harvard", the appropriate option (named "Harvard Library" in the OpenAthens Federation) is all the way down as the 5th result. The user has to scroll through the results to see it: https://i.imgur.com/Pte3xR0.gif

So we'd like to permanently set "Harvard Library" in the OpenAthens Federation at the top of the results list, since most of the Harvard-associated people who log into The Economist will belong to the Harvard Library and therefore want to use the OpenAthens Federation.

Is this currently impacting your ability to use OpenAthens effectively? Yes
Idea type Ease of use of specific or groups of tasks/actions
  • Attach files
  • Guest
    Aug 7, 2025

    For a relevant OpenAthens Service Desk ticket, see OASD-27930