Bamboo Person Service

The Bamboo Person Service can help scholars access all the resources (tools, collections, and shared data) they have permissions for due to their institutional affiliations, scholarly society membership, association with research groups, etc. By connecting accounts from these different groups (e.g. a Google account for a research group, a university ID, and a generic username for a scholarly society), scholars will be able to use resources provided by any of these groups, in any work space or tool environment within the Bamboo ecosystem. Where previously research groups would have to agree on a single environment to work collaboratively and share their data, the Bamboo Person Service can allow group leaders to indicate which scholars in the Bamboo Person Service should have access to a set of data, which will then become accessible for each of those people in the environment of their choosing.

The Bamboo Person Service also provides mechanisms for making contributions to projects easier to document (e.g. to present to tenure and review committees), by keeping track of which individuals are doing curation work on corpora, or contributing entries to Bamboo DiRT. As the Bamboo Person Service develops, it may be integrated with social and scholarly networking sites, to allow scholars to opt into sharing the tools they use, as part of their profile.

For tool developers and collection holders, the Bamboo Person Service can reduce the time and development effort that would go into writing custom authentication and authorization, and can facilitate quality control in crowdsourced projects by keeping track of the curator assessments made about the validity of individual users' additions.