5. Service Strategy

During 2007/2008 EDINA succeeded as an organisation geared to the delivery of high quality online services. The operation of EDINA national services was undertaken by the appropriate team identified in EDINA’s structure of management and operation:

Table 1: EDINA Team Structure

User Support (Helpdesk, Advisory, Outreach, Documentation & Training)	Support to users and their support staff, and feedback to the service delivery teams: promoting the EDINA services; providing a helpdesk and allied activities; learning from, and addressing the needs of, academic support staff and end users, through high quality training, online documentation and presence at key conferences and events
Service Delivery (Bibliographic and Multimedia Services; Geodata Services; Learning and Teaching)	Delivery of online services: developing, implementing and maintaining effective online data services, including the design and implementation of customised client software, server functionality and databases, and ensuring regular data updates. Learning and teaching services and their development are the responsibility of all service areas and are supported by the Learning and Teaching team.
IT Technical Infrastructure	Management of the IT platform: reliable and sufficient support of online services; planning and maintaining the underlying software and hardware platforms; network connections; effective liaison with Infrastructure Services of the University’s Computing Services (EUCS)*; specialist programming support as required.
Business Development and Administrative Support	Business, projects and administration: co-ordination, facilitation and provision of administrative support; seeking out and evaluating new opportunities for collection and development; providing an overview of all project work.

*The Infrastructure services provided EDINA with support in the installation, operation and maintenance of the hardware and operating system components of multiple SUN servers, the UNIX computing platforms used to host the EDINA services, and the connection to the Internet.

The JISC IE is the centrepiece of JISC's collections policy. The overall aim of the JISC IE is to develop a framework that will support the creation of an easily accessible, comprehensive information resource that can be used by teachers, learners and researchers within and beyond the UK Higher Education community. During 2007/2008, EDINA worked in support of that aim, contributing to the JISC IE through projects and services.

5.1 Information Management

Presentation plays a key part in online service provision.

From August 07 to January 08 the EDINA home page presented our services through a series of "web rooms":

• Reading and Reference Room
• Sound and Picture Studio
• Map and Data Place
• Scottish Gathering
• Learning and Teaching
• Aladdin’s Cave

The purpose of the web room representation on the EDINA home page had been to allow the end-user (staff or student) to view the EDINA services from the perspective of their purpose.

In February 2008 EDINA launched a new home page which gave greater prominence to our services and divided the services into four main groups:

• Reading and Reference
• Maps and Data
• Multimedia and Education
• Projects and Middleware

The Help & Support area was expanded along with the creation of a dedicated section for Library and Support staff.

5.2 Technology

EDINA has used both commercial and open-source solutions, with three purposes in mind: to host and manage content; to deliver services across the Web; to facilitate interoperability.

EDINA continues to move towards a more open technological and service environment. EDINA is a major component of the JISC IE and e-Infrastructure with its use of software and protocols to support interoperability. This provides the context for choice of application software and database management systems with which to deliver online national services. This is most obvious for bibliographic services, but has importance for multimedia and geospatial data as the use of these data increases in UK HE and FE.

Commercial products used for hosting services included Laser-Scan, ESRI ARC/INFO, SAFE FME Software, Snowflake, ExLibris Aleph 500, Intrallect’s IntraLibrary, Oracle and Ingres. Laser-Scan and ARC/INFO were used for data processing and map generation. SAFE and Snowflake are used for data translation, formatting and data delivery. Aleph 500 is used to ingest and display data from contributing libraries to SUNCAT. IntraLibrary underpins the delivery of the Jorum. Oracle, Postgres and Ingres are relational database management systems used in the delivery of geospatial data, with Oracle also being used to support SUNCAT.

The LaserScan software, which underpins the Digimap Service, is scheduled to be replaced by open procurement. The procurement was completed this year (see Section 11, Digimap Procurement section). However, it will take at least 18 months to 2 years to migrate the various Digimap Collections to the new map production system, which is provided by CadCorp Limited. One consequence of this will be a move away from the use of Ingres to Postgres.

Open source software included Open SiteSearch, Apache::ASP, Zebra, PEARS, MySQL, Postgres, GeoServer and MapServer. Open SiteSearch and Apache::ASP were used for web application development (presentation layer, session management, database clients); Zebra and PEARS were used for specialised text indexing and retrieval purposes, and MySQL and Postgres where relational databases were required. In many instances the reliability and support offered for these products exceeds that of similar commercial products.

Apache was used as the World Wide Web server, sometimes in combination with Jakarta Tomcat, mod_perl or Apache::ASP. Perl and Java (mainly server-side) are used extensively for data processing, infrastructure services (interoperability), and in the implementation of user interfaces.

EDINA has implemented various established standards for interoperability in services and projects, including Z39.50, SRU/W, OpenURL and OAI/PMH. Z39.50 and SRU/W provided search and retrieval of metadata across bibliographic and multimedia services, and were very heavily used for federated searching. OpenURL provided context sensitive linking from bibliographic services, and was heavily used for linking to institutional OpenURL resolvers (link servers). OAI/PMH provided metadata harvesting.

Web Services and RESTful services have been used during project development as a solution for interoperability requirements and are used in services, e.g. Digimap, UKBORDERS and Go-Geo!. In the wider geospatial community, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is at the forefront of developing and promoting open standards for the exchange, discovery, exploitation and rights management of geographic information. These subsequently become ISO standards. EDINA has been an associate member of the OGC for several years, and is actively engaged in implementing OGC interoperability standards. One of the interesting challenges is the integration of these standards with the others promoted and used within the JISC IIE and e-Infrastructure.