Most of the publishers use IP filtering as a de facto standard for authenticating authorized users in subscribing institutions and providing access to e-resources to them. While IP-based access is most convenient, safe and hassle-free authentication mechanism for publishers as well as for subscribing institutions, it has some limitations. One of the most serious limitation of IP-filtered access to e-resources is that the users can access e-resources only when they are in the Institute campus. Ideally, an authorized user should be able to access e-resources irrespective of his / her physical location at any time as long as he has access to the Internet.

In order to overcome this limitation, the INDIAN Access Management Federation (INFED) has adopted Shibboleth, a standard-based open source software, for authenticating authorized users from institutions and provide them seamless access to e-resources from anywhere, anytime. Shibboleth offers a mechanism for users to access multiple resources within a federated single sign-on framework. The goal of the INFED is to allow users to access internal and external resources seamlessly using a single, institutionally controlled identity. This would not only allow authorized users to access e-resources from anywhere, anytime but would also circumvent the requirement of maintaining multiple passwords for multiple resources in multiple domains.