Case Study: Koninklijke Bibliotheek

InAcademia allows you to request verification in real-time using trusted authentication services without having to subscribe to, or offer your services through, a market place or third-party portal. The Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) is the national library of the Netherlands. Driven by the power of the written word they further intellectual development, proficiency and creativity in the Netherlands. The KB promotes the visibility, usability and longevity of the Dutch Library Collection, including collective holdings of all publicly funded libraries in the Netherlands. Unhindered access to these collections furthers the development of new ideas and allows researchers to build upon the ideas of their predecessors. A key focus centres on digital resources on cultural sciences. For example:

• E-book Central: More than 400.000 scholarly ebooks on a variety of subjects in the humanities and social sciences.
• Databases: A large amount of databases with publications about history, politics, environment, arts, religion and sports.(Inter)national newspapers:
• A Worldwide selection of recent newspapers and magazines from the last three months.

As part of this goal the KB offers discounts to members of a wide range of educational institutes across the Netherlands. In order to process these discounts it is necessary to validate the credentials of these applicants without the costs, complexity and delay of receiving and checking copies of student cards or other physical identity processes. By using InAcademia, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek can rapidly and automatically validate credentials. This improves the experience of the users and reduces the workload of the KB, using InAcademia as part of the process to sign up new memberships, validating that each applicant is entitled to become a member and to qualify for the discount. “We were previously using a SURFconext validation service which was reaching end-of-life and so we needed to switch to something new. We were pleased to find InAcademia, a very light-weighted validation service, that exactly meets our needs. Implementation was simple and quick. From now-on our student customers can prove they are a student just by authenticating like they are used to do in their own institution. We love the service.” Johanneke van Dorp, Koninklijke Bibliotheek

“The Koninklijke Bibliotheek had been connected to a legacy platform for over 5 years, this was now being phased out. The advantage for SURFnet of using InAcademia is that once institutions are connected to InAcademia - like the Koninklijke Bibliotheek is now - we are also able to connect other merchants and research institutions to the students of these institutions. There is no need for every institution to take any further action on a new connection. Because InAcademia works via eduGAIN, by connecting the Koninklijke Bibliotheek to InAcademia, lots of new institutions have now connected to eduGAIN. That’s a perfect enhancer foe eduGAIN as well. The use of eduGAIN has become more accessible for them. Great news for everybody.” Thijs Kinkhorst - Technical Product Manager Trust & Identity - SURFnet