11. Service Reports

11.1 Reading and Reference Services

SUNCAT

SUNCAT is a UK national catalogue of serials. Since becoming a full service in August 2006, the number of Contributing Libraries has reached 70: an additional four libraries began contributing data to SUNCAT during 2008/2009. All but three of the Contributing Libraries, because of various local problems, are being regularly updated.

The pool of MARC format records from the CONSER database, supporting the downloading facility available to staff in Contributing Libraries only, was extended by the addition of records from the ISSN Register. There are approximately 1,500,000 records in the Register.

As part of an ongoing process to assess the SUNCAT service, two surveys were carried out during the year. One was a review of duplication and was a follow up of an earlier survey carried out in 2007. There was an improvement in satisfaction levels from the earlier survey and the development to the interface, whereby library locations are displayed on the Results List alongside each title, was felt, by those surveyed, to have made a significant impact.

A key finding from the Impact and Satisfaction survey carried out in March/April 2009 was that 92% of respondents experienced good or excellent satisfaction using SUNCAT.

A JISC funded project – Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas (D2D) – was completed in July 2009 and has expanded the functionality of SUNCAT. The most important development was the building of linkages between SUNCAT and the Zetoc (Tables of Contents service) operated by Mimas. Having identified a particular journal title, SUNCAT users are now able to display all the articles in the latest issue of the journal and, if appropriately licensed, be able to view the full text. In those cases where a user is not licensed to access the full text it is possible to pay to receive hard copy available through the British Library Direct Service. This facility is due to be implemented in the SUNCAT service in Autumn 2009.

The Depot

The initial role of the Depot was to provide the UK academic community with an online deposit facility for eprints during the interim period while Institutional Repositories (IRs) were being set up. Among other policy issues, the Depot was to put in place material support for the prospect of mandates from research funders for Open Access self-archiving.

Throughout 2008/2009 both EDINA and SHERPA continued to promote, support and encourage use of the Depot through contacts with institutions, researchers and funders. The initial purpose for the Depot was judged to have been successfully completed, and the project funding from JISC for the Depot as part of JISC RepositoryNet came to an end in March 2009.

Prior to the scheduled end, an extension was agreed with JISC to continue the Depot in its current form until September 2009. During the period March – September 2009 an options appraisal and public consultation were carried out to determine a viable exit strategy. The outcome from this exercise was that the Depot would add significant value by continuing as a support activity for, and promoting, the open access agenda on a worldwide basis rather than its current UK focus.

Land Life Leisure

Land Life Leisure is a weekly updated digest of press releases, reports and articles in the field of rural information.

A rebranding exercise took place early in 2009 which resulted in a change to the service name (from Land, Life & Leisure to Land Life Leisure). A new logo and interface were also introduced and support documentation was updated.

The subscription base to the service remained at around 40 separate, university, college and non-academic organisations including the existing consortium of public libraries in West Wales.

Statistical Accounts of Scotland

The Statistical Accounts of Scotland is a online version of the full text of two accounts of Scottish parishes conducted in the 1790s and 1830s, published as the First and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland.

Correspondence including letters from parish ministers to Sir John Sinclair relating to the Statistical Accounts; and from Sir John to individual parish ministers encouraging them to forward the statistical account of their parish, and the original correspondence received by Sir John Sinclair regarding the parish of Forganny were added to the subscription service during 2008/2009.

An online payment system that enabled users to subscribe to The Statistical Accounts of Scotland service for periods of two, six or twelve months was developed and yielded 20 subscriptions during 2008/2009.

CAB Abstracts

CAB Abstracts, the bibliographic database compiled by CAB International, celebrated ten years of service at EDINA in 2008/009. In addition to a contemporary service from 1973 onwards, an archive is offered by separate subscription covering the period 1910-1972. During the year full-text content from CABI was added to supplement the many full-text links in the service and weekly database updates were also implemented.

SALSER

SALSER, the serials catalogue for Scottish academic and research libraries, was updated in 2009.

After much preparatory work, progress was made in making SALSER more current. The Scottish libraries which contribute data to SUNCAT also have it loaded into SALSER now, Stirling University being the latest contributor. Other Scottish libraries make regular updates.

Several libraries began contributing once again, including Glasgow Caledonian University and Glasgow School of Art. The SALSER team continued their communication with other libraries and hope that some holdings will be updated later in 2009, and new libraries added.

Changes were also made to the supporting website including the addition of downloadable PDFs of posters and leaflets.

Inspec

The five year CHEST agreement, under which the EDINA service was offered with Ovid, came to an end in August 2008. EDINA Inspec site representatives had been informed and given the details of the changes in Spring 2008. During August the final steps were undertaken to remove access to the service, including the visible links on the EDINA website.

11.2 Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Services

UK LOCKSS Alliance

Launched in August 2008, after a two-year pilot, the UK LOCKSS Alliance is a cooperative movement of UK academic libraries that are committed to identify, negotiate, and build local archives of material that librarians and academic scholars deem significant.

EDINA provides support for the UK LOCKSS Alliance, in conjunction with the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). The UK LOCKSS Alliance has worked closely with JISC Collections to build upon NESLi2 and NESLi2-SMP negotiation activity.

The UK LOCKSS Alliance, to which 18 libraries have subscribed, has also acted as a focal point for discussion on the issues of journal preservation and rights management, providing a forum to discuss current developments with the goal of assisting the UK library community in making a collective and considered response to changing environments.

Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) is an international initiative to ensure libraries remain central to the process of scholarly information management.

CLOCKSS

As more and more content moves online, there is growing concern that this digital content may not always be available. CLOCKSS is an international digital preservation scheme for scholarly publications, initially journal articles. It has been built by and is being supported by a partnership of the world's largest scholarly publishers and the library community. Taken together the publishers supporting the CLOCKSS initiative account for over 60% of such digital journal content. The University of Edinburgh was one of the seven founding libraries.

EDINA, together with Stanford University Libraries, acts as a designated Open Access host for 'orphaned' journal content when a trigger event is confirmed. To date three sets of content have been released, both testing the readiness of the CLOCKSS system and making available under Open Access journal articles that might otherwise have been lost to global scholarship.

Central to the operation of CLOCKSS is a distributed long term archive network, with routine ingest of publishers' current (and past) content into secure LOCKSS-managed storage under the stewardship of internationally-recognised and globally-distributed research and university libraries.

CLOCKSS moved to full service in 2008, with Edinburgh becoming the Archive Node in Europe among a global network of eleven steward libraries. Fund-raising for endowment began to provide the necessary financial sustainability of CLOCKSS.

11.3 Geospatial Services

Digimap GIS Platform Re-engineering

The selection process for the procurement of a replacement map production system for Digimap was completed in June 2008 and CadCorp Ltd, a UK company, was awarded the contract. The re-engineering of the OS Collection began in July 2008.

Over the past year, a considerable volume of work has been completed to install new hardware, install, test and configure new software, and to re-engineer the existing user facilities to ensure that maps from the new system function properly, with the intention to launch the new platform in September 2009.

Digimap Collections Support Pages

The web pages supporting the Digimap Collections service have been updated and rearranged to make them easier to navigate. There is a significant volume of information on these pages which users of EDINA's geo services find useful. New case studies have been added and information for support staff has been improved.

Work was also planned to implement a new system for delivering and managing help pages within Digimap Collections. EDINA has started to examine options for a content management system which will enable easier maintenance and greater flexibility of use.

Ordnance Survey Data Collection

Use of OS Digimap continued to grow considerably in 2008/09, with some 39,000 active registered users from 161 universities and colleges using the service. Although the number of sessions remained at an average of 20,000 per month, the creation of maps for printing continued to increase to nearly 145,000 in the 2008/09 academic session. Despite the withdrawal of Land-Line.Plus data in August 2008, users downloaded a quarter of a million data files of Ordnance Survey products in 2008/2009 (this figure excludes the OS MasterMap data). OS MasterMap Topography Layer is the replacement for Land-Line.Plus and, as a seamless database, usage is measured in square kilometres rather than tiles. Since the launch of MasterMap Download in September 2007, users have downloaded more than 980,000 km² of OS MasterMap Topography data, and 28 million km² of OS MasterMap ITN data. This includes 560,000 km² of OS MasterMap Topography data, and 11.8 million km² of OS MasterMap ITN data downloaded in 2008/09.

New Ordnance Survey Licence

During the run up to 1 August 2009, considerable time was spent negotiating a new Variation Agreement to the 2007-2009 Licence Agreement. The majority of the Licence arrangements remained unchanged, although the opportunity provided by the variation agreement resulted in some improvements. Significantly, the definition of Authorised User has been extended to include any user who belongs to an eligible, subscribing UK institution and whose institution offers them access to electronic resources. This includes retired and honorary members of staff and distance learning students. The stipulations over what size of maps may be published have also been relaxed, allowing much larger ground areas of map to be published than previously permissible. The new Variation Agreement will run until 31 July 2010 by which time a new licence arrangement will be in place to cover the period 2010 – 2014.

New Mapping Facility

In parallel with the re-engineering of the GIS platform, EDINA engineers have built a brand new mapping facility using new technologies. The new facility, called Roam, provides access to twelve fixed-scale map views through which users can zoom in and out. Locating an area of interest is very easy; users can navigate using the click-and-drag function common to many online mapping services. Printed maps are offered as PDF files as before but now with the options for A3 as well as A4 size maps, and the choice of portrait or landscape. The usual place name, postcode and grid reference searches are available, and the vector maps can be customised on the fly using check boxes for each group of features to be included or removed from the map. Still under development is a function to bookmark maps for future reference. EDINA is also looking at widening the range of print formats and options and the ability for users to annotate their maps. Roam will eventually replace the current Classic facility.

OS MasterMap

OS MasterMap is updated by applying just the changed items to the database. This was done on a twice-yearly basis, and applied to both the Topography Layer and the Integrated Transport Network (ITN) Layer. Users were able to download a dataset for their area of interest which contains only the changes to the objects in that area, rather than having to download the complete dataset again. While this functionality may seem of limited use over very short time periods, it can be invaluable for longitudinal studies, and for those interested in the speed and nature of changes to a particular area over time. So far the popularity of this function has been limited, although there has not been sufficient time for longitudinal studies to have become properly established and for users to become sufficiently advanced to make appropriate use of this function.

Consternation amongst users with the removal of Land-Line.Plus has been significantly less than EDINA anticipated. As far as EDINA is aware, the move to OS MasterMap and GML has been relatively smooth. Efforts by both EDINA and local support staff to facilitate the transition have paid off well.

Support for spatial data and the use of GIS within institutions is significantly lacking across the academic sector. With the arrival of OS MasterMap and the more complex types of data in the other Collections offered through Digimap, demand for support in using both the data and GI software will inevitably increase. EDINA is trying to respond and offered courses aimed at end users and not just site representatives. However, the lack of local support remains a concern. On behalf of JISC's Geospatial Working Group EDINA has undertaken an investigation into the current levels of support available to academic users across the UK and to establish how these might be improved.

During 2008/2009 EDINA, in conjunction with JISC Collections and Ordnance Survey, negotiated offering an online mapping facility and a map streaming facility (via WMS) to the schools community. EDINA continued to examine alternative routes for accessing the data it hosts, through both mobile platforms and as web services. Both of these alternative routes will make additional demands upon the Digimap infrastructure. As a result, EDINA continued to look at alternative approaches for handling the additional load. Use of Grid technology is one possibility, as is the use of cloud computing. The latter is getting increasing attention within the GI Industry.

Historic Digimap

Historic Digimap offers historic Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain to UK HE and FE. Historic maps continue to prove popular with a total of 72 institutions subscribing. This was an increase of five subscriptions on the previous year. Usage rose yet again with nearly 52,000 sessions across the year.

Work to upgrade the mapping interface began in 2008/2009 but was delayed by the replacement of Digimap's underlying GIS platform. This will continue into 2009/2010 and has built on the significant work done with the Ordnance Survey Collection to create a new mapping application which uses the click-and-drag "slippy maps" function. Further work to create a new client which will allow users to download greater numbers of historical maps in one request was started. Currently, it is only possible to download historical map sheets one by one.

During 2008/2009 EDINA took delivery of large-scale historical Town Plan data from Landmark Information Group. Over the coming year work will be done to offer these through Historic Digimap.

Geology Digimap

Geology Digimap delivers geological maps and data from the British Geological Survey (BGS). The number of subscribing institutions in 2008/2009 increased to 43. The number of registered users rose dramatically to just over 29,000, more than doubling the previous year's figure. The number of sessions rose, but not quite in line with the number of users, there being just under 24,000 logins in 2008/2009.

The British Geological Survey are very happy with the uptake of this service and are drawing up a list of other data sets that might be added to the collection at no extra cost.

Marine Digimap

Marine Digimap, which provides marine and coastal zone mapping and data from SeaZone Solutions Ltd., was launched in January 2008.

The service provides raster marine maps of various scales and detail (derived from Admiralty Charts), which are ideal for backdrop mapping in the UK coastal zone. Furthermore, users are able to download SeaZone's Hydrospatial data, a feature-rich vector GIS dataset containing 'topic' layers such as 'Bathymetry and Elevation', 'Structures and Obstructions' and 'Conservation and Environmental Protection' amongst others.

Since the service's inception, nearly 5,500 users have registered from 16 subscribing institutions. While this is a service which will appeal directly to those studying or researching the UK marine and coastal zone environment, it has wider appeal to many other disciplines.

ShareGeo

ShareGeo, a geospatial data sharing facility within the Digimap suite of services that is accessible to all registered Digimap users, was launched in January 2009.

ShareGeo was developed out of a previous JISC funded project called GRADE (Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction) which investigated a number of issues relating to the role of repositories. An output of this project was the development of a demonstrator repository. ShareGeo built on the work done for the GRADE project by significantly enhancing it both from a technical and usability point of view, including integrating the facility into the Digimap user authentication and authorisation mechanism.

ShareGeo allows users to share and re-use derived geospatial datasets within the Digimap licensing arrangements. It allows data sharing to take place that would otherwise not have been previously possible due to restrictions on reuse of licensed data. The data offered by ShareGeo includes both spatial data derived from datasets already licensed through Digimap, as well as open access data. The data can be for any geographical extent or region.

Key developments that took place included:

• Upgrading the underlying repository to the latest version of DSpace (1.5.1)
• Redesigning the user interface to align it with the other Digimap services and incorporating it into the Digimap Collections page
• Automatically allowing access to registered Digimap users once they have accepted the ShareGeo terms of use
• Implementing data access restrictions so that exiting Digimap licensing arrangements are respected
• Increasing the number of accepted geospatial data formats
• Developing clear terms of use and policies for use of the facility

During 2008/2009 there were 93 datasets available for download from ShareGeo and there have been over 1000 logins with over 500 datasets downloaded. EDINA receives no funding from third parties to operate ShareGeo. At the end of the GRADE project, EDINA took the view that a facility like ShareGeo was a critical component of the evolving UK academic spatial data infrastructure and decided to fund its operation on a trial basis to gauge the level of demand for such a facility. To date much of the usage has seen users taking data rather than contributing data. This is rather disappointing although it follows the trend seen with other attempts to provide repositories of research data. It was decided that a review of ShareGeo and its use would be carried out at the end of 2009 and a decision then taken on whether to continue to provide it.

Go-Geo!

The Go-Geo! portal is the place to discover geospatial information and services for education and research. Go-Geo! enables users to find data, geospatial services and resources, learn about geospatial metadata and access tools to create and publish standards-compliant geospatial metadata.

During its first year of service (November 2008 – July 2009), Go-Geo! achieved the following key milestones:

• In terms of usage, average monthly page requests doubled during the first six months of 2009 to over 21,000.
• With the successful appointment of a dedicated portal content coordinator, there were around a 100 monthly additions to news, events, conferences, books and other resources.
• GeoDoc has been formally incorporated into student coursework in the Archaeology Department at the University of Southampton by Dr. David Wheatley, a recognised pioneer of GIS archaeological applications. This has resulted in a private institutional metadata node holding over 250 metadata records. Dr Wheatley said "The tools provided 'a useful way to encourage my students to document their datasets and introduce ideas about interoperability and re-purposing spatial data".
• Mimas contributed 191 metadata records for their Landsat 4/5, 7 and SPOT imagery for the UK and Landsat 5 & 7 Mediterranean imagery. These metadata records need to be updated and then converted from FGDC format to compliant with the UK Academic Geospatial Metadata Application Profile of the international metadata standard for geospatial data ISO19115 prior to being added as a new metadata collection.
• Go-Geo! is a critical component in the UK academic spatial data infrastructure (SDI) but, as a consequence of being interoperable, it can also be a part of the developing UK SDI. However, to be compliant the metadata needs to presented to the UK SDI in the correct format. Thus work began on aligning AGMAP with the new government GEMINI2 and European INSPIRE metadata profiles.
• The Go-Geo! service manager was invited to attend a UK Location Programme meeting, part of the UK SDI development activity, to present on lessons learned from running a national geospatial portal.

agcensus

agcensus provides grid square agricultural census data for England, Scotland and Wales, and was accessed by 17 academic and non-academic organisations during 2008/2009. During the year a significant enhancement was made to the service to enable the creation of agricultural census 'Mash-ups' with a new 'KML' output added to the standard CSV format.

KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is a file format that uses XML-based language to manage geographic information. Originally, KML was used to display data in Google Earth and Google Maps but with the adoption by the OGC, KML files will become a standard for managing spatial data across a variety of mapping applications. The EDINA agcensus data is offered for download in OGC Standard KML.

UKBORDERS

UKBORDERS is an integral part of the ESRC Census Programme for which EDINA acts as the Geography Data Unit. The annual report for UKBORDERS is published separately by the ESRC.

11.4 Multimedia services

Film & Sound Online

Film & Sound Online is a set of collections of film and video covering a wide range of subjects. Subscriptions continued to increase to 382, a 7% rise from 2008.There were 63,499 user sessions, 90% in HE, 10% in FE..

Delivery of the new Wellcome Film collection began in February 2009 and is scheduled to continue until December 2009. A total of 258 new films had been added by 31 July 2009. The service continued to offer access to three film trails and 47 reviews. Three new case studies were added, making a total of 11.

Education Image Gallery

The Education Image Gallery provides access to a collection of 60,000 images. The images are drawn from the vast resources of the Hulton Archive, Photodisc and the Getty Images^® News Service. Subscriptions continued to increase to 121, a 10% rise from 2008.There were 25,793 user sessions, 83 per cent in HE, 17 per cent in FE.

A refreshed user interface was designed and implemented and brought into service in January 2009. JISC Collections commissioned EDINA to extend the EIG for Schools service until July 2010.

NewsFilm Online

NewsFilm Online is a collection of some 3,000 hours of downloadable television news , cinema newsreels and associated materials, selected from the ITN/Reuters archives including several key cinema newsreels. The content depicts selected events from the last 100 years.

The NewsFilm Online service was available from 1 August 2008 and launched publicly on 3 October 2008. Within a year, by 31 July 2009, 306 institutions had subscribed to the service.

There were 27,502 user sessions, 65 per cent in HE, 35 per cent in FE.

Liaison continued with the multi-institution HEA project led by Glasgow University tasked with producing exemplars of the use of NewsFilm Online content in a number of different subject areas in HE.

Service enhancements funded by JISC include:

• cross-link NFO metadata with the BUFVC British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND)
• investigate searching and browsing by place
• expose NFO service metadata to Google and other search engines
• implement browse-by-download

This work started in April 2009 and is scheduled to be completed in early 2010.

A commenting facility has been developed during 2009 and with the intention to include it in service in September 2009.

11.5 Middleware

GeoCrossWalk

The principal purpose of GeoCrossWalk is to provide a shared terminology service within the JISC IIE that can underpin geographic searching and georeferencing. GeoCrossWalk is designed to make geographic searching transparent by 'crosswalking' these different geographies and is analogous to a shared terminology service.

GeoCrossWalk has several different facets:

• A gazetteer database 'GeoCrossWalk' – a detailed database of geographical features, names and their associated geometrical representations. The gazetteer is a value added hybrid database sourced from a range of Ordnance Survey datasets
• A middleware layer Application Programming Interface (API) – a lightweight access layer that allows other services to query the gazetteer
• A geoparser – a natural language entity recognition service that can parse resources (text, html, xml) for geographic place names and relate these to the gazetteer (the geoparser can use different gazetteers if available but defaults to GeoCrossWalk). The geoparser provides a mean to translate implicit geographically referenced resources into explicitly georeferenced ones

GeoCrossWalk was selected by JISC as a pilot case to test the new transition from project to service process and as of November 2008 became a JISC service. Due to the Ordnance Survey's withdrawal of its large scale Land-Line.Plus product, the first task for the 2008/2009 period was updating of existing database content using Ordnance Survey MasterMap data (the Land-Line.Plus replacement product). Allied to this have been the incorporation of additional content with less restrictive licensing and the finalisation of the migration to a completely new, dedicated hardware and software environment. A dedicated Service Manager was also appointed.

OpenURL Router

The OpenURL Router was developed to address the issue of allowing linkage from bibliographic services to OpenURL resolvers. Although the OpenURL standard provides an encoding bibliographic metadata, enabling 'referrer' services to link to OpenURL resolvers, there is no mechanism that aids the referrer in determining to which resolver the link should be addressed.

The OpenURL Router provided a central registry detailing OpenURL resolvers, the institutions to which they belonged, and certain details (UK Federation identifiers, IP addresses and domain names) that helped in identifying members of that institution. (Athens identifiers registered prior to August 2008 are kept for backward compatibility, but new registrations do not include Athens identifiers.)

This allowed referring bibliographic services to address OpenURL links to the correct resolver for each end user, without any prior knowledge of the user or their institution. GetCopy provided a default service for users who are directed to the OpenURL Router, but whose institutions did not have a registered OpenURL resolver.

The OpenURL Router showed continued strong growth in usage over 2008/2009 Usage figures for each year from 2004 to 2009 are shown in the tables below.

Table 1: Total number of requests received by the service.

This includes OpenURL requests directed to openurl.ac.uk, which are to be redirected to the users' local resolvers; registry queries ('lookups') from service providers; requests for button images; and requests resulting from directing users via an Athens authentication point. There were also a small number of invalid requests, largely originating from search engines.

	Number of Requests
2004/2005	1,884,759
2005/2006	4,263,221
2006/2007	9,635,645
2007/2008	15,035,600
2008/2009	30,796,114

Table 2: Redirections of an end user's browser with a positive outcome (defined as a redirect request that results in the end user being redirects to an appropriate resolver).

Success rate is the proportion of positive outcomes as a percentage of all redirect requests.

	Number of Requests	Positive outcomes	Success rate
2004/2005	585,638	540,741	92.3
2005/2006	1,461,522	1,422,057	97.3
2006/2007	2,838,925	2,751,137	96.9
2007/2008	2,643,263	2,520,914	95.4
2008/2009	5,796,839	5,691,651	98.2

Table 3: Registry queries with a positive outcome (defined as a request that results in details of an appropriate resolver being returned).

Success rate is the proportion of positive outcomes as a percentage of all registry queries requests.

	Number of Requests	Positive outcomes	Success rate
2004/05	13,928	62,049	45.3
2005/06	787,119	170,962	21.7
2006/07	1,114,891	371,309	33.3
2007/08	2,148,280	496,371	23.1
2008/2009	13,213,348	323,682	2.4

The comparatively low rate of positive responses for lookup requests is to be expected. That mechanism is provided to enable referring service providers to determine whether the OpenURL Router can provide an end user with an onward link to an institutional resolver, prior to presenting them with a link in the user interface. This is most useful in circumstances where a significant proportion of end users are not from institutions registered with the OpenURL Router (for instance, a service with many end users from outside of the UK). In these cases positive responses should not be prevalent.

During the year, the number of institutions registered with the OpenURL Router rose from 83 to 94.

Shibboleth Development and Support Services: Support for the UK Access Management Federation

EDINA provides technical and operational support to members of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research through the federation operator JANET(UK). Support calls from members are forwarded from the JANET(UK) support desk to EDINA for resolution. While the team at EDINA has sufficient experience and knowledge to resolve most technical and administrative queries, it has the backup support of the SDSS Expert Group to solve the really intractable problems.

The SDSS federation support team also updates and manages the metadata that underpins the federation. The metadata is signed daily to ensure its integrity before being shipped to the federation operator for distribution to federation members.

Following an initial period of frenzied activity in 2008 during the transition from Athens to federate access the federation has grown steadily and continues to grow, currently comprising around 730 members and almost 900 entities. It is noticeable that while initial activity was supporting larger HE institutions, now queries are received from smaller academic institutions (HE and FE) and commercial publisher.

The SDSS federation support team's resources include a number of tools, mainly provided by the SDSS Expert group. These include test SPs and IdPs and certificate checkers. The latter are especially useful for advising federation members when certificates are about to require renewal.