8. Promotion and Marketing

We continued our efforts to market our services to academic staff and students at subscribing institutions. As in previous years, we did this by assisting site representatives and other support staff in their local promotional activity, by providing copies of posters, flyers and other informational material, either free or on a cost-recovery basis.

EDINA collaborated with other related providers in promoting and marketing our services. Examples include the Census Registration Service (CRS) for UKBORDERS and TASI for publicising the Education Image Gallery.

Links with the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs) were further consolidated. We attended several of their events throughout the year (see Appendix 6).

During the year, EDINA identified a number of relevant specialist conferences at which to exhibit e.g. LILAC, UKSG and HE Academy. A full list of conference presentations and exhibitions attended is given in Appendix 6.

Highlights in EDINA's calendar included:

• RGS/IBG conference, London, 29 August – 31 August 2007
• Internet Librarian, London 8-9 October 2007
• Online Information, London, 4-6 December 2007
• JISC Conference, Birmingham, 14 March 2008
• LILAC, Liverpool John Moores, 21-22 March 2008
• GISRUK 2008 (GIS Research UK) , Manchester 6-8 April 2008
• UKSG – Serials Group annual conference, Torquay, 13-15 April 2008
• RSC East Midlands e-fair 2008, Leicester, 24 June 2008
• HE Academy – 4th annual conference, Harrogate, 1-3 July 2008

Flyers and posters were distributed at a number of other events.

The following means were used to promote EDINA services and to keep users informed of developments:

• The EDINA website (http://edina.ac.uk).
• Newsline, EDINA’s quarterly newsletter, distributed in print to all site representatives and other interested parties, and available on the EDINA website.
• Articles and advertisements in other newsletters and publications.
• EDINA’s JISCmail lists: digimap-announce@jiscmail and edina-sitereps@jiscmail.ac.uk.
• JIBS user group JISCmail list: lis-jibs-user@jiscmail.ac.uk.
• Other JISCmail lists as appropriate.
• Information stands and product presentations at conferences and meetings.
• Presentations at other awareness-raising events.

In addition blogs were released in early 2008 for the Digimap and SUNCAT services as new channels to provide information relating to relevant developments. Also a greater number of news items were generated and posted on the EDINA website. Both of these in turn have built-in RSS feeds and from subsequent monitoring we are aware that such announcements have been picked up and appeared on other blogs in the community – UK HE and FE and beyond.