I’ve noticed a surge of interest in OpenID recently. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s basically a single sign on solution for the web. If you have a personal web site, blog, or other account, it can potentially be used as an authentication mechanism for other web accounts. With OpenID, if you are signed into your main (ID) account, you will be automatically signed into any of your other web accounts that are OpenID enabled.
WordPress.com just announced that their accounts can be used as OpenIDs. So I can now use my blog account to automatically authenticate on other OpenID enabled services. Other sites like Digg have announced that they plan to support OpenID in the future.
So it looks like OpenID may be going mainstream. How long until library vendors support this? When the rest of the world is using OpenID on sites like Flickr and MySpace, how many library catalogs will support it for patron login? I’m afraid that I already know the answer.
How much do you want to bet that the first OpenID enabled library system will be an open source product?
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