Case Study: Bulk uploads at Warwick University

Note: Warwick started using the Shibboleth Athens Gateway in September 2006 but continue to use Classic Athens for access to the non-compliant databases.

Many UK universities use the bulk upload facilities of Athens to create usernames from a list of approved individuals from another data source. This could simply be an Excel spreadsheet showing all the students on a course, or more usually it could be a data feed from student registry. Athens only needs a small amount of information: name and email address, however administrators are recommended to add a student or staff number to aid in identifying individuals with similar names in future.

The University of Warwick is consistently ranked in the Top Ten UK Universities. The University Library has about 1 million printed volumes in its main building and 10 kilometres of archives in the Modern Records Centre. Over 26,500 items are accessioned each year, adding 1.1 km of stock (700 metres of printed materials, 400 of archives). Over 5000 printed periodical titles (including statistical serials) are currently received, and around 9000 electronic journals.

Around 1 million people enter the Library each year, with 4000-6000 coming through the turnstile during a typical term weekday. At peak times (during the exam term) over 1500 users can be in the Library.

Warwick operates sophisticated control over their Athens accounts. All members of the University register online for their campus login, and can elect to register online for Athens at the same time, or at a later date. New requests are checked against institutional databases of staff and students and if approved bulk uploaded to Athens. Each account is set to have an expiry date of eight weeks ahead. Additionally, once a week, a check is made against those accounts soon to reach their expiry date. If the user is no longer registered in the institutional databases, the Athens account will be deleted in the bulk upload.

Athens usernames are the same as the campus login, with an additional prefix of war to identify Warwick. This aids user recollection and reduces queries to the Help Desk, although memory of the password is not particularly good.