Help needed: username/password authentication

[K. W.]

Dear Colleagues,

Those of you who subscribe to both listservs please
forgive the cross-posting! I need your help for a
problem I am having as follows:

Our library subscribes to a wide range of databases
and ejournals that are made available via our proxy
server. However, there are certain databases and
ejournals that can not be put into the proxy server,
either due to vendor restrictions, or because it's
provided by the business school and is available to
only a few (Master or PHD) students. All these
resources have one thing in common: they all have
their own username and password. As the number grows,
it becomes very difficult to manage all these
usernames and passwords. Someone suggested that we
design an unified interface where people can just log
in and get authenticated once, and then can use these
exclusive sources without logging in each one with
various username and password. Somehow I figure it
would mean integrating the authentication on the
vendor's side and on our side. They also mentioned
something like LDAP. 

I have no idea how to begin this and I don't know of
any kind of precedence in our library system. Could
you give me some suggestions as to how to approach
this, and what tools are available? If you have done
this before, would you mind sharing your experience?

Thank you very much in advance!

Kerry Wu
Digital and Data Services Librarian
Commerce Library (http://door.library.uiuc.edu/crx) 
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tel: 217-333-0169
Email: qiwu at uiuc.edu

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