What EDINA Does: A Community Report

EDINA is a JISC National Datacentre

All

imag

es ©

Jupi

teri

mag

es 2

006

1

Intr

oduc

tion I hope that this will give you a

useful overview on what EDINA does, summarising our services and wide ranging project activities.

Our purpose at EDINA is to seek ways ‘to enhance the pro-ductivity of research, learning and teaching’. This we do mainly by delivering first-class online ser-vices to staff and students in UK universities, colleges and research institutions; providing access to key information and data resources. The best way to appreciate the value of our services is to go to our recently revised website, where you can browse good quality documenta-tion and case studies and, with the right credentials, you can log-on and get maximal value.

Over a third of the staff effort at EDINA goes into research and development and on building the infrastructure needed to support future services. A recent success, of wide-ranging significance, has been the role that the EDINA SDSS team has played with JANET (UK) in the area of national infrastructure for JISC and BECTA on behalf of the research and education com-munity. This has included technical expertise and support in the roll out of the Shibboleth-based UK federation, with additional designa-tion of the team by JISC as their Expert Group on Access Manage-ment. You will find a lot more about the rest of our projects in the pages of this Report: on content, find-ing aids, shared services and other ‘middleware’.

We constantly review how best to add value across Internet. There have been radical changes since we first launched In 1996 with the keywords, ‘outreach, accessibility, inter-working and interoperability’; these still hold true in the ever-changing environment of the web. The second generation of the web

seems to be about sharing in new ways. In the early days EDINA supported services for staff and stu-dents to ‘get stuff ’: to search for and download records, maps and data; we now provide services for them to ‘put stuff ’: to share resources across the community for research, learning and teaching.

The credit for our success is shared: by EDINA staff, by our partners, and by those who entrust us with the task. This includes JISC, the research councils, and most of all the academic support staff in UK universities and colleges – on whom we also upon as partners. This is also an opportunity to ac-knowledge the leverage for the UK academic community that is offered by the support, infrastructure and leadership from the University of Edinburgh, and from our business partners who supply data, software and hardware.

Having left you with this calling card, we would be pleased to have you get back to us, in person, by email or by phone. We welcome your feedback. There is ‘Feedback’ link at the top of every page of our new website, at http://edina.ac.uk .

Peter BurnhillDirector

IntroductionFebruary 2008

Contents Community Report February 2008

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Online services . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Film & Sound Online . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Education Image Gallery . . . . . . . . 3

UKBORDERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Digimap Collections . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Land, Life & Leisure . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Index to The Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Statistical Accounts of Scotland . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

CAB Abstracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Emerging services . . . . . . . . . 6

OpenURL Router . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

SUNCAT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Jorum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

The Depot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Services in development . . . . 8

GetRef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

GetCopy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Project activity . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Go-Geo! Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Shibboleth Development and Support Services . . . . . . . . . . . 9

GRADE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

GeoCrossWalk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Visual and Sound Materials Portal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

GEESE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Outreach & Support . . . . . 11

Help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Consulting Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

t

Community Report February 2008

t

2

Onl

ine

serv

ices

Online services now on offerEDINA provides national online

services for universities and colleges to offer to their academic staff and students.

EDINA is now funded to pro-vide services to all academic institu-tions within higher education (HE) and further education (FE) in its role as JISC National Data Centre.

As of February 2008 there are 499 institutions licenced to use EDINA services which is a slight increase from the total of 491 institutions licenced to use EDINA services in 2006/7. This represents more than a three-fold increase compared to 2002/03.

With ‘market coverage’ of over 90% of universities and two thirds of all colleges, EDINA is an estab-lished part of the UK digital library.

The total number of institu-tional licences for EDINA services continues to rise: currently the total is 1395, this compares with 1300 for 2006/7, and 1213 in 2005/6.

Those licences are mainly subscriptions paid over to JISC Collections via a subscription agent, although some services are provided without charge, such as UKBORDERS, financed by the Eco-nomic and Social Research Coun-

cil (ESRC) as part of its Census Programme. For a small number of services, such as CAB Abstracts, EDINA collects the subscriptions for what are JISC-Approved rather than JISC-Funded. But the general model remains – the online ser-vices are ‘free at the point of use’, using methods of authentication & authorisation supported by the UK Access Management Federation.

Over the past five years there has been a steady increase in up-take of EDINA services by universi-ties, partly reflecting embedding of such successful services as Digimap – which since its initial launch of access to Ordnance Survey map-ping in January 2000 has become essential for almost all universities, across nearly all disciplines, and now includes historic, geological and hydrographic mapping. The increase in university and college uptake also reflects interest in multimedia ser-vices, such as Film & Sound Online.

Uptake of licences for Jorum, the national repository for learning materials run jointly with Mimas, its sister National Data Centre, ac-counts for some of this increase, in both universities and colleges.

The call by JISC and the Learn-

ing Skills Council to provide ser-vices to further education colleges, where a lot of higher education now takes place, accounts for much of the increase over the past five years. The offer of free access to Digimap given by JISC to a number of colleges resulted in 42 deciding to take up a full subscription.

EDINA also hosts a growing number of services that offer ‘open access’ to all across the Internet. These include SUNCAT, the national union catalogue of serials held in over 60 of the UK’s major research libraries, and the Depot, a key deposit facility for JISC Re-positoryNet in its role to enhance exposure of UK research output. This type of service is expected to grow, alongside the ‘privilege of membership’ services for the UK academic sector.

3

tCommunity Report February 2008

Onl

ine

serv

ices

Imag

e ©

Jupi

terim

ages

200

6Im

age

© G

etty

Imag

es

Film & Sound Online

Launched in 2003 and currently available until 2009, the Film & Sound Online service delivers hun-dreds of hours of copyright-cleared, downloadable film, video and audio from 16 collections. The film and video content covers a broad range of subjects, from medicine and the life sciences through archaeology, media studies, performing arts and music to philosophy, history and the social sciences. There is also a significant classical music audio collection. All material is available by progressive download which is more manageable over slower bandwidths and effectively the same

as streaming when local connectiv-ity is high speed. Films are available in full or in segments, and users may browse by subject or collection, or use free-text searching. Recent en-hancements to the service include case studies, reviews, film trails and a user forum. Film & Sound Online is free to subscribing institutions, of which there are now 346.

For more information see: http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/

Education Image Gallery

Launched in 2004 and currently available until 2010, the Education Image Gallery service offers access to 55,000 downloadable images licensed from the world-famous Getty Images archives. A further 5,000 images are being added in monthly batches until 2010. The images in the services cover a diverse range of subject areas such as sport, fashion, major events, buildings, politics, social history, key personalities, transport, industry, work, leisure and music. The images

are copyright-cleared and can be downloaded for use in learning, teaching and research. Users can continue to use images embedded in learning materials even after the current licence ends. Institutional subscriptions currently stand at 106.

For more information see: http://edina.ac.uk/eig/

Multimedia & Education Services

JorumAs a national repository for

learning and teaching materials, Jo-rum has two main purposes. First, it offers a place in which JISC-funded content for learning and teaching can be stored, managed and made available on a continuing basis to the community. In the past, publicly-funded content has been lost to the community when project teams have dispersed, and institu-tions have not always been able to maintain the local servers in which it was deposited.

Second, the existence of Jorum allows the re-use and re-purposing of learning and teaching content across the UK. This breaks new ground by offering not only op-portunities for teaching staff to download and use the materials, but also opportunities to deposit institutionally developed materi-als. A service website, dissemina-tion events, support documents, promotional materials and registra-tion procedures are available and have been used to support the Jorum Contributor and Jorum User

Community Report February 2008

t

4

Onl

ine

serv

ices

Jorumservices, which were launched in November 2005 and January 2006 respectively.

To date the service has had over just over 20,000 logins by 4,337 registered users at 396 registered HE/FE institutions and contains just over 2500 learning resources.

In 2008 Jorum enters a second

phase of development where it investigates operating a more open repository service using creative commons licences and UK specific licences. The intent of this devel-opment is to make more of the resources easily available to the educational community in the UK and worldwide and to reduce the amount of the administrative effort

required of users to access the service to a minimum. The Jorum project team will also be investigat-ing different ways of engaging with the user communities and develop-ing additions to the service that help users make the most of the resources.

For more information see: http://www.jorum.ac.uk/

Maps & Data Services

Go-Geo! Portal

Imag

e ©

Jupi

terim

ages

200

6

Go-Geo! is a component of the UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure, a key entry point for users to discover and access geo-graphic data. Functionality includes cross-searching, map-based search-ing, geographic searching (through the use of a national gazetteer service developed by EDINA and the UK Data Archive as part of the GeoCrossWalk project), and search by a range of different criteria.

The portal simultaneously searches across several geospatial

catalogues. Users can find other related resources such as books, photographs, projects, maps, train-ing courses, learning materials, news, events, organisations, journals and software for their geographic area of interest.

For more information see: http://www.gogeo.ac.uk/

OS

map

© C

row

n co

pyrig

ht. B

ound

ary

mat

eria

l © t

he

Cro

wn,

Pos

t O

ffice

and

the

ED

LIN

E co

nsor

tium

UKBORDERSThis is the longest-running

service offered by EDINA; in fact it slightly predates the launch of EDINA as a JISC national data centre in 1996. An integral part of the ESRC Census Programme, for which EDINA acts as the Geogra-phy Data Unit, UKBORDERS offers access to more than 350 digital boundary datasets for past and present geographic areas. A recent additional service offers the ability to download postcode directories. In 2006/7 users from 119 institu-

tions registered with the Census Registration Service and used UKBORDERS. The total number of dataset extractions continued to increase, and was around 25,000 over this period. So far in 2007/8, users from 105 institutions have registered to use UKBORDERS.

For more information see: http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/

5

tCommunity Report February 2008

Onl

ine

serv

ices

© C

row

n co

pyrig

ht 2

006.

Digimap CollectionsThe Digimap Collections have

become an essential part of the information landscape supported by JISC, and with significance across the disciplines as a key reference data collection, for use in both research and in learning and teaching. The Digimap Collections deliver maps and map data of vari-ous types on a subscription basis. Originally, Digimap provided online access to national mapping from Ordnance Survey. In April 2005, a second Collection was created to provide access to earlier raster maps from Landmark Information Group. Two further Collections have since been launched. In Janu-

ary 2007 users gained access to mapping from the British Geological Survey (BGS), as Geology Digimap, and since January 2008 Digimap was further extended to include hydrographic map data provided through Marine Digimap. In 2005/6 JISC offered FE free access to the Digimap Collections; 86 institutions took advantage of this offer, leading to 53 FE institutions subscribing in 2006/7. A total of 146 universities and colleges have subscribed to the Digimap Collections in 2007/8.

For more information on all the Digimap Collections, see: http://edina.ac.uk/digimap/

Digimap - Ordnance Survey CollectionDigimap Ordnance Survey Col-

lection delivers digital map data and high quality cartographic products based on selected Ordnance Survey map products, with full coverage of Great Britain for all of those datasets. Users can choose their own scale, control the feature content of their maps, print maps up to A0 in size, and download spatial data for use in GIS and CAD applications. The use of Digimap’s Ordnance Survey Collection con-tinues to rise: in 2006/7 there were 32,000 active users; an average of

more than 21,000 sessions per month and users created nearly 3.5 million maps. All subscribing institutions were given access to the OS MasterMap® product in September 2007. This includes the Topographic and the Integrated Transport Network (ITN) Layers. One of EDINA’s biggest challenges has been to help users and institu-tions move from the highly detailed Land-Line.Plus® product to OS MasterMap, which is a complex product, but brings significant benefits.

Historic Digimap Historic Digimap provides ac-

cess to digital Images of historical Ordnance Survey paper maps of Great Britain for the period 1843 to 1996. JISC purchased images digitised by Landmark Information Group, and made them available under a subscription arrangement. Users can view maps through web browsers, save maps for print-ing and download the historic

map data for use in geographical information systems. There are cur-rently 65 institutions subscribing to Historic Digimap and during 2006/7 users viewed nearly 850,000 maps.

Community Report February 2008

t

6

Onl

ine

serv

ices

Geology Digimap Launched in January 2007,

Geology Digimap delivers geologi-cal maps and data from the British Geological Survey (BGS). Users are able to view maps through a web browser, save maps for printing and download the geological map data

for use in Geographical Informa-tion Systems. There are currently 35 subscribing institutions rising from 29 institutions in 2006/7. We expect this to rise further.

Marine Digimap Launched in January 2008,

Marine Digimap provides access to hydrographic maps and data from SeaZone Solutions Ltd. Two data products are available: Hydrospa-tial, a vector dataset providing information in Topic layers, ranging from bathymetry and elevation, to climate and oceanography; and Charted Raster, which are scanned

images of Admiralty Charts. Users are able view maps through their web browser, save them for printing and to download the marine and coastal data for use in geographi-cal information systems. So far, four institutions have subscribed to Marine Digimap and a further ten institutions have requested trial access.

Reading and Reference Services

agcensusAfter several years offering an

off-line delivery service, EDINA started to offer a national online service in 2004. The agcensus service provides online access to grid-square Agricultural Census data for England, Scotland, and Wales. The data ranges from 1969 to present and provides realistic estimates of what was produced,

how much was produced and where it was produced. Users can visualise or download data for use in other software packages, such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) or spreadsheets. Currently the service has 17 subscribing institutions.

Land, Life & Leisure

Land, Life & Leisure provides a weekly index of current practice and developments in temperate agriculture and all rural topics - conservation, estate management, forestry, horticulture, organic husbandry, rural planning, recreation and tourism, and environmental issues. The database originates from the academic and research commu-nity, mainly Aberystwyth University , with ongoing contributions from its Institute of Rural Sciences and

five other land-based colleges. A recent interface upgrade added new links within the service and streamlined certain other features. The content continues to expand at a rate of over 15,000 records a year. The archive back to 1990 now exceeds 500,000 entries. For more information see: http://edina.ac.uk/landlifeleisure/

7

tCommunity Report February 2008

Onl

ine

serv

ices

CAB AbstractsCAB Abstracts is a bibliographic

database compiled by CAB Interna-tional and offered by EDINA since 1999. It covers the significant re-search and development literature in the fields of agriculture, forestry, aspects of human and animal health, conservation and leisure & tourism. It now contains over five million records from 1973 to date. 150,000 records are added each year from over 10,000 serial titles, books,

monographs, technical reports, proceedings, patents and published theses. In addition to the contem-porary service an archive is offered by separate subscription covering the period 1910-1972.

For more information see: http://edina.ac.uk/cab

Imag

e ©

199

8 Ph

otoD

isc, I

nc.

The service comprises Palmer’s Index to The Times (covering the years 1790 to 1905), and the Of-ficial Index to The Times (covering the years 1906–1980). Together this provides an invaluable reference for historians of all areas of British life and international affairs. Searches can be run via keyword or on the basis of a broad subject index to retrieve the precise page refer-ences to the 17.5 million published articles during the period.

For more information see: http://edina.ac.uk/times-index/

Imag

e ©

Jupi

terim

ages

200

6

Index to The Times

Inspec

Offered in partnership with Ovid technologies, EDINA Inspec has been a CHEST-authorised ser-vice since 1998. Inspec, produced by the Institution of Electrical Engi-neers, is a premier database provid-ing access to the world’s leading scientific and technical literature in physics, electrical engineering, electronics, communications, control engineering, computers and com-puting and information technology.

Community Report February 2008

t

8

Serv

ices

in d

evel

opm

ent Statistical Accounts of Scotland

The Statistical Accounts of Scot-land is probably the best source of contemporary comment on Brit-ain’s experience of the agricultural and industrial revolutions (covering the period 1790 to 1845). There is both a free service and a value-added service accessible by institu-tional subscription. The value-added service has advanced searching, a transcript of the text, and a number of additional texts that lend histori-cal context, such as a transcription

of the questions asked of ministers by Sir John Sinclair, digitised images and an annotated transcript of the manuscripts for the parishes of Dumfries and Stow, Sir John Sinclair’s Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland published in 1826 and the 1801 census return for the parish of Stow.

For more information see: http://edina.ac.uk/stat-acc-scot/

EDINA’s partnership with Ex Libris, the success of SUNCAT has been due to collaboration with staff from all of its contributing libraries.

The continuing challenge in 2008 is to sustain and enhance the service by tackling issues associated with the variable quality of seri-als data in UK libraries. There will also be a focus on interoperability throughout the value chain, from publication to access, and linking to other national serial catalogues.

For more information see http://www.suncat.ac.uk

SUNCAT

Imag

e ©

Get

ty Im

ages

As the UK National Catalogue of Serials, SUNCAT has two princi-pal aims: to be the key resource for locating serials titles in UK research libraries, and to be a source of high-quality records to help upgrading of local catalogues. A third aim is to integate this facility as a functional component within the UK digital library.

Funded by JISC, SUNCAT con-tains the ISSN Register, the CONS-ER database and the serials records of 66 of the UK’s largest research libraries. These libraries Includee the national libraries, all major research libraries and a number of significant specialist libraries. In addition to

SALSER

SALSER is a virtual union cata-logue of serials holdings in Scottish academic and research libraries. The service offers online information about journals, newspapers, annual reviews and proceedings. Through SALSER users can discover which serials are held where; connect to the library management systems; and obtain Information about

SALSER libraries such as opening hours, visitor access and borrowing arrangements.

For more information see: http://edina.ed.ac.uk/salser

9

tCommunity Report February 2008

Imag

e ©

Jupi

terim

ages

200

7

The Depot

Launched in June 2007, the purpose of the Depot as a national facility is to enable all UK academ-ics to share in the benefits of open access exposure for their research outputs. ‘Put it in the Depot’ is a simple message to give to UK re-searchers. The Depot supports the policies of institutions and national

funding agencies towards open access, and aids policy development in advance of a comprehensive network of institutional repositories (IRs).

The facility is based on E-Prints software and is OAI-compliant. Like other UK repositories, its con-tents are harvested and searched through the Intute Repository Search project. It offers a redirect service, called the UK Repository Junction, to ensure that content that comes within the remit of an exist-ing repository is correctly placed there instead of in the Depot. Additionally, as IRs are created, the Depot will offer a transfer service for content deposited by authors based at those universities, to help

populate these new IRs. The Depot acts as a ‘keepsafe’ until a reposi-tory of choice becomes available for deposited scholarly content. In this way, the Depot avoids compet-ing with existing and emerging IRs while bridging gaps in the overall repository landscape and encourag-ing more open access deposits.

For more information see: http://depot.edina.ac.uk

Imag

e ©

Jup

iter

imag

es 2

006

OpenURL Router

The OpenURL Router has been funded as a JISC service since August 2006, having originally been developed as a ‘spin-off ’ from the ZBLSA project, then tested for use

in the JISC Information Environment (IE) by UKOLN. The OpenURL Router helps service providers solve the appropriate copy problem by routing an OpenURL query to the OpenURL resolver being used by a given user’s institutional library. The OpenURL Router thus joins up online bibliographic services to OpenURL resolvers and, thereby, to full text.

The OpenURL Router has a central registry of OpenURL resolv-ers, the institutions to which they belong, and other secure details (Athens identifiers, IP addresses and domain names) that help in identifying members of institutions. This allows a referring bibliographic

service to address OpenURL links to the correct resolver for each end-user, without any prior knowl-edge of the user or their institution. The number of institutions regis-tered with the OpenURL Router has risen to 78.

For more information see: http://www.openurl.ac.uk/doc/

UK Federation Support

The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Re-search (known more briefly as ‘the UK Federation’) has been managed by JANET(UK) since its inception on 30 November 2006. The design and infrastructure of this national federation, which will eventually

provide web-delivered service access to all UK education sectors and to the UK research sector, is based on the pilot SDSS federation developed at EDINA.

JISC and Becta have provided funding to enable EDINA to con-tinue to contribute technical and

operational support to JANET(UK) in their management of the UK federation.

For more information see: http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/

Community Report February 2008

t

10

Serv

ices

in d

evel

opm

ent

Services in development supported by JISCEDINA is engaged in a number

of ‘services in development’, largely begun with funding made available by JISC through its Development Programme. For example, three

products suitable for deployment as services emerged from the JISC 5/99 Programme: GetCopy, GetRef and GeoCrossWalk. These are described below, each at a stage of

test, trial and deployment, as well as on the EDINA website.

11

tCommunity Report February 2008

Out

reac

h &

Sup

port

Causewayside House, 160 Causewayside Edinburgh, EH9 1PR Tel: +44 (0)131 650 3302 Fax: +44 (0)131 650 3308 edina@ed .ac .ukhttp://edina .ac .uk