Content
Content Access Service
British Pathe News Archive
Audio Network
National Archives
The Learning Curve
JANET(UK) is working closely with the Regional Broadband Consortia and 'opt-out' Local Education Authorities in England, Learning and Teaching Scotland, Curriculum 2000 in Northern Ireland, NGfL Cymru and the Local Authorities in Wales, to enable access to high quality content for schools interconnected to the JANET network.
The Content Access Service (CAS) is being developed to provide UK-wide access to licensed online educational content. The first phase involved JANET(UK) creating and managing a Content Access Registry (CAR) of IP addresses by the end of July 2005. The JANET Technical Administration Group provides support for this registry via the JANET Service Desk.
Whilst this location-based approach to security does not provide an ideal mechanism for authentication, it is compatible with the current system required by the relevant content providers (British Pathe, Audio Network and the National Archives Learning Curve) and will provide a scalable solution as the number of products available to schools increases. This is seen as an interim approach during the development of standardised secure user authentication and authorisation using Shibboleth.
A CAS Task Group of RBC, Becta and JANET(UK) representatives has been set up to oversee the work. The Task Group has consulted with representatives of the DfES on the potential for funding a pilot proxy server to broker content requests across the National Education Network (NEN) in England. The Task Group is also considering related activities including: an NEN DNS service; an NEN search engine; content delivery and hosting; content management; content licensing; Intellectual Property Rights, etc.
