EDINA seeks to enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching in UK Higher and Further Education as a JISC-designated national datacentre delivering specialist data services.
To manage and present a portfolio of data services.
To sustain leadership in the provision of specialist data services, e.g. bibliographic and digital map data.
To offer a significant part of the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE), by achieving critical mass, market presence and effective collaboration.
To increase the overall utility and relevance of EDINA services, by
To widen access to on-line services, by
To continue to move to an open technological and service environment, by
To sustain and develop a healthy and well-found datacentre, by
To sustain an effective blend of service orientation and development capability, by
To develop and maintain an exceptional IT capability, by
EDINA aims to offer a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week service. Information on planned breaks of service is broadcast to users in advance.
The EDINA Helpdesk is staffed during normal office hours, Monday to Friday. Times during which the Helpdesk is not staffed, such as public holidays, are advertised in advance. It is staffed in a rota system, although duty officers are also drawn from a wider pool within EDINA specifically trained for that purpose. This ensures contingency backup.
The national services included as part of EDINA are funded from several sources, including JISC (via SHEFC), the University of Edinburgh, and by subscription from UK Higher and Further Education Institutions (HEIs and FEIs). A list of subscribing institutions is in Appendix 3.
The provision of services for Art Abstracts, Art Index Retrospective, BIOSIS, Digimap, and Compendex is funded by JISC; UKBORDERS is funded jointly by ESRC and JISC. All other services are funded by direct subscription. These online services are available free at the point of use by staff and students at subscribing institutions for UK academic purposes.
All national services supported by EDINA have been grouped within the scope of the Data Library structure of management and operation.
The User Support Team's purpose is to support users and their support staff. The members are responsible for promoting the EDINA services; for providing a Helpdesk and allied activities; for learning from, and addressing the needs of, academic support staff and end users through the provision of high quality training events, documentation and attendance at relevant conferences; and feedback to the service delivery teams.
The Service Delivery Team's purpose is to ensure delivery of on-line data services. The functions are those of developing, implementing and maintaining effective on-line data services. This includes the design and implementation of customised clients, server functionality and databases, and ensuring regular data updates. Within this team are groups responsible for bibliographic services and for geo-data services.
The IT Technical Infrastructure Team's purpose is to ensure the reliability of the platform to support the on-line services. It is responsible for planning and maintaining the underlying software and hardware platforms, for effective liaison with Infrastructure Services of the University's Computing Services (EUCS), and for specialist programming support as required.
The work of all teams is supported by the Administration and Business Development Team. The purpose of this team is to co-ordinate, to facilitate and to provide administrative support; to seek out and evaluate new opportunities for collection development, and to provide an overview of related project work.
The Infrastructure Services of EUCS provides EDINA with support in the installation, operation and maintenance of the hardware and operating system components of pentlands.ed.ac.uk and pentlands2.ed.ac.uk, the UNIX computing platforms used to host the service, and the connection to the Internet. EUCS manages and operates the largest University-based computing service in the UK and has supported national and regional services since the late 1960s. Edinburgh continues to be a centre of computing and networking excellence, with connections to all major academic networks, including SuperJANET.
EDINA services cover a range of academic disciplines resulting in a heterogeneous user community and target audiences with different user requirements. Each service is assigned a Service Co-ordinator, charged with ensuring the 'long term health' of that service and carrying out a monitoring role on service performance. However, EDINA cannot have staff with specialist knowledge in all subjects covered by its databases: such specialist support is therefore sought from appropriate experts, such as the data vendors, relevant University departments and such as the subject-based Information Gateways (e.g. Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), Organising Medical Networked Information (OMNI, part of BIOME). We continue to have good working relationships with the subject-based data organisations, such as the Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS) - particularly the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and the History Data Service (HDS) - and with other non-JISC organisations in the electronic library, such as the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN).
EDINA bibliographic and research data services and associated Data Library activities are organised into subject-based 'faculties':
The purpose of the faculty representation is to allow the end user (staff or student) to view the EDINA services within the perspective of a larger 'information landscape'. Rather than a 'one stop shop' approach, this alerts the actual or prospective user of the EDINA national services, through hot-link pointers, to the existence of other services and facilities of relevance. These include JISC-sponsored services and the subject-based resource discovery facilities, as well as related services.
In order to aid navigation of resources, the EDINA services are also categorised by type:
It is also part EDINA's strategy to provide alternative views of the Information Landscape, for example, the data of special relevance to Scotland.
The principal software used for service delivery are commercially-proven products: OpenText BASIS, OCLC SiteSearch, OVID Web Gateway, Laser-Scan, ESRI ARC/INFO and Ingres. The first two software products have specialist use as database management systems for the bibliographic datasets: BASIS has relational and transactional functionality; OCLC SiteSearch is particularly suited for use within the distributed environment, supporting WWW desktop browser access and Z39.50 v3 interoperability. The OVID software similarly provides Web and Z39.50 access to bibliographic databases. Laser-Scan and ARC/INFO are used for geographic information systems (GIS) applications. Ingres is a relational database management system.
Open URL has been adopted as linking technology for bibliographic services.
Apache is used as the World Wide Web Server, and Perl and Java (client and server side) are used extensively for data processing and in the implementation of user interfaces.
EDINA's policy on provision of documentation and help facilities are outlined in EDINA's Service Level Definition, which is available from the JISC's Monitoring and Advisory Unit (MAU).
The EDINA Website is designed with a view to improving accessibility: specifically, to help users with visual impairments, and to help all users to navigate the site and to identify the services of particular relevance to them. As part of a JISC initiative to ensure that its service providers comply with legislation, EDINA was audited for accessibility by the Digital Media Access Group (University of Dundee), the EDINA website, itself reached a high level of accessibility. In addition it is our aim to offer attractive Web pages without excluding those with relatively low-tech equipment.
On the Website, EDINA services are organised into the subject-based 'faculties' and data types. Links to other information services in the UK Electronic Library are also offered, which alert users to the existence of other services and facilities of relevance.
Publicity material in the form of the well-established EDINA A5 flyers and A3 posters were produced and distributed. As with our existing services, new services launched are documented by means of A4 fan-folded 'Quick Reference Guides', and with support material on the EDINA Website.
Online tutorials for a number of EDINA services were published on the Web in HTML format, and as PowerPoint files which can then be downloaded and used as training aids by site representatives and other local User Support staff. Additional Screen Cams were developed to cover the majority of the EDINA services.
All the changes described here were announced in EDINA's quarterly newsletter, Newsline, which continues to play an important role in keeping academic support staff and others with an interest in our services abreast of developments at EDINA. We also include articles from individuals in UK academia, to gain a wider perspective on trends in the community and EDINA's role within it.
EDINA operates a Helpdesk that acts as the primary point of contact for all enquiries concerning EDINA services and responds to enquiries from both end users and support staff. Helpdesk staff are trained to categorise queries, and enter them into a call-logging system. Calls are mostly solved directly by the helpdesk staff or referred to 'experts' inside and outside EDINA as appropriate. Helpdesk enquiries also form an intrinsic part of our user feedback system for the purpose of future developments.
During the reporting period, EDINA offered a number of workshops and seminars, mainly covering geospatial services. Details are given in Appendix 6. In total, 106 places in workshops were taken up during the period of the report; a total of 77 people as some attended more than one workshop.
During the period of the report, five Digimap workshops were arranged. This was one less than the previous year due to last year's addition of an FE training session. One of these workshops was cancelled due to lack of interest, September 2001 (Portsmouth). Other workshops took place in September 2001 (Newcastle), December 2001 (Newcastle), January 2002 (Plymouth), June 2002 (Portsmouth). Feedback from users is still extremely positive and the Digimap team are continuing to revise the workshops with a view to making them even more interactive. Workshops are now geared towards either Site Representatives or GIS support staff, not both as previously designed. Trainees may attend both types of workshop if they wish to but have the option of only attending one. This ensures the workshops are better tailored, and attendees can avoid going over information already known to them.
Two OS MasterMap Workshops were also delivered jointly with the Ordnance Survey in February 2002 at Southampton and Edinburgh. Feedback from users was extremely positive and both workshops were very well attended. This feedback has been very useful for EDINA in informing proposals to JISC regarding OS MasterMap.
Two BIOSIS workshops were organised over the summer break but were cancelled due to lack of interest. This bears out the information gained from the Training Needs Analysis that Site Representatives will only attend training for new or greatly altered service. Conversely, the response for workshops for new non-geographic services launching outside the period of this report has been very positive.
In addition to events organised by EDINA, there was involvement in those arranged by others. In January we had a guest slot at two SOSIG workshops in Stirling and Edinburgh. Likewise we participated in a series of workshops, arranged by Ei, to promote Compendex during February and March across the UK and Ireland. The turnout at these events was high, underlining the value of such ventures, both to us (as providers) and our users (as participants).
We continued to work with the JIBS User Group as an appropriate forum for input from users of EDINA bibliographic services. This year, the group indicated that they wished to add multimedia services to its remit. The Group's JISCmail list was used in addition to communication directly with EDINA's site reps to keep users informed of service news. During 2001/2002, EDINA staff attended meetings of the JIBS User Group and presented reports, when invited to do so.
With the disbanding of the Digimap Steering Group in June 2001, a new Advisory Group has been formed but with the "steering" element handed over to the EDINA Steering Committee. The Advisory Group will meet bi-annually and comprises representatives of the various Digimap user communities i.e. researchers, map librarians, general users and FE.
UKBORDERS users receive information via the 'edina-ukb' JISCmail list and continue to be represented through the ESRC Census Advisory Committee that comprises a broad cross-section of relevant groups within the academic community.
During the year EDINA consulted with User Support staff and other representatives of the user community on issues surrounding interface changes for the Compendex and Digimap services as well as preparation for the launch of UPDATE. There was also user consultation over the closure of the BIOSIS telnet interface.
We continued our efforts to market our data services to the academic staff and students in the 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 informative material, either free or on a cost-recovery basis. We also continued our co-operation with the data vendors in promoting our services.
A major challenge during 2001/2002 continued to be the promotion of the Digimap service. The EDINA Digimap service is of interest to a very wide range of users - geographers are expected to form a small minority. This has implications both for the dissemination of information from EDINA and the nature of local support required. A number of documents publicising the service and addressing these issues have been produced and circulated within the community and published as help pages within the service. The training courses for Digimap were revised also emphasised these aspects and provided suggestions for local site support staff on how to publicise the service within their own institutions.
On 10 April 2002 MIMAS hosted the Geo-data forum with EDINA at Manchester University, for all interested members of UK academia.
The aims of the day were:
As in 2001, the event was attended by a wide range of people including institutional Site Representatives for geo-services such as Digimap and UKBORDERS and academics who use geo-spatial data in their teaching or research.
Updates were given by members of EDINA and MIMAS relating to the geo-data services offered by the two data centres. Members of the teaching community also presented papers about their use of these services and the data available. In the afternoon there were a series of presentations about new services and data. Topics covered the Great Britain Historic GIS project, the RDN Geography and Environment Hub, and the new OS MasterMap product.
During the year EDINA identified a number of relevant specialist conferences at which attendance was appropriate, e.g. LTSN Engineering days, GISRUK 2002 and Alt-C. A full list of conference presentations and exhibitions attended is given in Appendix 6.
Highlights in EDINA's calendar included:
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:
Registration and authentication for most EDINA Services is carried out using ATHENS.
EDINA continues to advocate the use of personal ATHENS user accounts to allow us to offer user-level options. However, EDINA offers access to bibliographic Web services from individual and group ATHENS accounts. This has proved popular with those users who did not require the increased functionality offered through personal accounts. Authentication procedures for EDINA services (with the exception, currently, of Digimap) have been modified to use ATHENS single-sign-on (SSO).
The numbers of institutions subscribing to JISC supported services in 2001/2002 were:
Art Abstracts 58
Art Index Retrospective 13
BIOSIS Previews 29
Digimap 66
Ei Compendex 76
Inspec 35
UKBORDERS 126
Log-in statistics are given in Appendix 2.
The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) has become the centrepiece of the JISC's collections policy. The overall aim of the JISC IE has been described thus: "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". EDINA has continued its efforts to contribute to the development of the JISC IE through its project and service development work to comply with the JISC IE policy.
As part of our 'Learning and Teaching watch', EDINA has continued its with interested parties, both national and local to us here in Edinburgh.
The Index to The Times, 1790-1980 was launched on August 1st 2001, this services comprises Palmer's Index to The Times (covering the years 1790 to 1905), and the Official Index to The Times (covering the years 1906-1980). This service is a valuable reference for historians of all areas of British life and international affairs.
The Subscription Service was made available on October 1st 2001 to members of the communities represented by the Joint Board for the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. The Subscription Service offers access to extra features.
On October 1st 2001 EDINA enabled direct access to Ei Village 2, Ei's interface for Compendex including access to WebSite Abstracts, US Patents, Standards and Engineering Handbooks. Users were presented with a choice between EDINA's interface for Compendex which includes cross-searching of the web resources catalogue from EEVL, the Internet guide for Engineering, Mathematics and Computing and the Ei Village 2 interface. Additional user support for Ei Village 2 was sub-contracted to EEVL.
EDINA greatly increased the provision of bibliographic filters for the main bibliographic management software packages over the year. This work was carried out in collaboration with ISI (Research Soft).
EDINA has made the decision to stop supplying services via the Telnet gateway, as of 1 August 2002. The only two services left on the gateway, BIOSIS and SALSER, were under-used and it was decided the resources put into keeping them open outweighed the benefits. All the services that had been delivered through the gateway have now been upgraded and successfully migrated onto the web.
The agreements for EDINA to run the following services expired at the end of July 2002
EDINA was awarded the tender to run the UPDATE service in April 2002. UPDATE is a bibliographic database of land-based literature whose focus is more practical than scholarly which was originally run by the University of Wales Aberystwyth. The service was developed over a three month period and ran in parallel with the Aberystwyth service for one month from July 1st 2002 before being launched.
EDINA was awarded the tender to host ten collections of film and video in 2002. There are over 1,000 film titles in the collections, representing about 300 hours of playing time, and they cover a range of disciplines which include 20th century history and medicine. This service is still under development and is to be made available during the 2002/03 academic session.
EDINA was awarded the tender to host and support four collections of images digitised as part of the JISC Image Digitisation Initiative (JIDI) in 2002. A service was developed and tested that allowed cross-searching of multiple image collections, but licensing difficulties have prevented a final launch.
The past year has continued to see many developments in the Digimap service. Subscriptions continued to rise and now stand at nearly 70 while the number of active users is about 7,800. The total numbers of registered users increased from around 5,700 to 11,000. Usage of the service has risen reflecting the increase in users with 47,000 sessions and 82,000 maps downloaded for printing locally. EDINA has calculated that during March 2001 and February 2002 Digimap users downloaded 2.8m of data based on the OS commercial prices.
Following the signing of the licence agreements between OS, JISC and EDINA in June 2001, OS agreed that the 30% limit imposed on the availability of Land-Line.Plus data could be removed for the new academic year and beyond. 100% coverage of this dataset is now made available to the user community through Digimap's mapping facilities while each institution is permitted to download 23,000 unique Land-Line.Plus tiles per academic year.
At a Digimap Steering Group meeting on 2 April 2001, Ordnance Survey agreed to add their 1:50,000 Colour Raster data to the Digimap agreement. This became available through the service on 5 September 2001. All products with the exception of the Panorama contour and DTM data are now updated annually.
In November 2001, Digimap Carto was released to all users replacing the original Carto from the Digimap project service. This new advanced Java applet tool allows users allows users to select a map location either by place name, location map, map sheet or National Grid co-ordinates; to specify the map scale; to create plots up to A0 in size for printing; to 'bookmark' maps and return to them at a later date; to set a personalised home map.
In March 2002, Digimap Gazetteer tool was released to all users following a 4-week trial with site representatives. This tools allows advanced searching of the OS 1:50,000 place name gazetteer e.g. all farms within Fife as well as extraction of subsets of the database as either text or XML.
Also in March, OS announced that they were to add the Code-Point and Code-Point with polygons products to the Digimap service. Post-code searching was added to the standard mapping client in April. Entering a full UK postcode now takes the user directly to the corresponding detail view map (Land-Line data). During the last few months work has taken place on a specific download tool for Postcode data and a new postcode lookup tool. These tools will be released to all users at the start of the 2002-3 academic year.
Finally, during 2001 JISC funded EDINA to undertake a 9 month project to investigate the impact of Ordnance Survey's new product, MasterMap. With the agreement of JISC, the project was extended by 3 months so that consultation could include the newly formed Digimap Advisory Group. OS MasterMap is designed to, among other things, replace OS largest-scale product Land-Line. The project has investigated the requirements of the HE community, undertaken discussions with Ordnance Survey and other interested parties and looked at possible delivery models particularly as far as delivery of MasterMap DATA is concerned. MasterMap will bring significant benefits to users but will create challenges for EDINA, JISC and OS with regard to its delivery and the support of users.
A range of significant developments have occurred over the last year with respect to the UKBORDERS service. Specifically, work on the redesign of the service's architecture to utilise the Gothic Laser Scan spatial database that powers Digimap; the addition of a range of new datasets ; harmonised registration procedures via the Census Registration Service and re-engineering of the service to support ATHENS Single Sign On.
Service redesign - the new UKBORDERS service (under development) integrates the Feature Manipulation Engine, Laser-Scan's Gothic Spatial database, an external relational database management system and utilises a range of Web Map Servers (WMS) developed and supported by the EDINA geoservices team for the purposes of allowing contextual mapping of the census boundaries. A public interface via a Web Feature Server (WFS) will also be supported which will allow 3rd party clients to develop their own extraction clients for subsets of the UKBORDERS data holdings.
New datasets - Table 1 lists the new datasets that have been added to the UKBORDERS library of holding over the past year. In addition to these datasets which have been added to the download facility, a range of new derived datasets (Table 2) based upon the All Fields Postcode Directory (AFPD) Convert LUTs (http://convert.mimas.ac.uk/afpd/main.cfm) and representing the 'best-fit spatial analogues' of the lookup-tables have been produced. It is intended that these datasets will be made available under the redesigned UKBORDERS service in conjunction with enhanced metadata about their derivation, quality and utility. It is hoped that in conjunction with MIMAS, new complimentary LUTs and their 'spatial analogues' based on regular ESRC purchased updates to the AFPD may be added in the future thus allowing a temporal library to be built up.
Registration - As part of the 2001-2006 Census Programme funded by the ESRC, responsibility for registration to use census material within UK academia has been centralised at the Census Registration Service, Data Archive, University of Essex. In conjunction with the other census data support units, UKBORDERS has, since the beginning of August 2002, devolved the registration process to CRS. As part of this process, the UKBORDERS interface has been adapted to support ATHNES Single Sign On. Users of census materials now only have to logon once to gain access to all the materials held by the census support units (previously each resource entailed a separate login, password and registration which was not ideal from a users perspective).
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Synthetic Neighbourhood Localities (England, Wales & Scotland): Dataset created in 2000. Sourced from The Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), University of Newcastle - Coombes, M (2000), Defining locality boundaries with synthetic data, Environment and Planning A, 32: 1499-1518. Police Basic Command Units (England & Wales): These data represent police operational boundaries one level below a police force area as of December 1999. Sourced from the School of Geography, University of Leeds. NUTS-II: Second-level Administrative Units of Europe (England, Scotland & Wales). Sourced from the Commission of the European Communities, Eurostat - GISCO, Luxemburg. See the United Nations Environment Programme GRID website for information on the Europe-wide dataset from which it was extracted. NUTS-III: Tertiary Administrative Units of the European Community (England, Scotland & Wales). Sourced from the Commission of the European Communities, Eurostat - GISCO, Luxemburg. Forested/Non-forested Areas (England, Scotland & Wales). Sourced from the European Space Agency/European Space Research and Technology Centre - The International Space Year Office, as modified by UNEP/GRID-Geneva. CORINE Landcover: Ecological/Life Zones (England, Scotland & Wales). Sourced from the Council of Europe and Commission of the European Communities. Scale 1:3,000,000. The source data were last updated by CORINE in March 1989. 1991 Census: Urban/Rural Ward Categorisation (England & Wales). Sourced from the Office of National Statistics lookup-table. National Nature Reserves (Scotland). Sourced from Scottish Natural Heritage. Data were captured at a scale of 1:10,000 and released in December 2001. Data set includes information on area, site name, local council and Midas code. Sites of Special Scientific Interest (Scotland). Sourced from Scottish Natural Heritage. Data were captured at a scale of 1:10,000 and released in December 2001. Data set includes information on area, site name, site code, local council, SSSI Type and Midas code. |
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1998 European Electoral Regions
1998 Government Office for the Regions areas 1999 and 2002 Health Authorities 1998 Local Authority Districts 1999 Standard Statistical Regions 1999 TECLEC 1999 Primary Care Groups 1998 NUTS-1, NUTS-2, NUTS-3 1998 NUTS-4, NUTS-5 1999 NHS Regional Office Areas 1998 Local Education Authorities 1999 Postcode Sectors 1999 Postcode Districts 1998 Ward boundaries |
Following a successful 8-month scoping study, JISC awarded funding early in 2002 to EDINA and the History Data Service for a second phase project. The central aims of this project are:
The key objectives are:
It is intended that the project will involve organisations outside UK academia in the development of the gazetteer demonstrator. This includes the British Library, Ordnance Survey, the Office for National Statistics, Public Archives, Place Name Societies, English Heritage, Royal Scottish Geographical Society and SCRAN and other appropriate bodies.
The project will investigate various technical issues such as the issues involved in making the gazetteer a Z39.50 target, the use of SOAP as an access mechanism, and most importantly questions about performance and scalability of the service. Finally, but not least the project will consider the level of interest and commitment of interested parties outside tertiary education and the costs involved in populating the gazetteer, linking the data and quality assuring the data.
The project runs from May 2002 to June 2003.
The Geo-data Browser phase I project was a 10-month (1st August 2000- 31st May 2001) collaborative project between EDINA, and the History Data Service (HDS), based at the Data Archive. In early 2002 JISC announced funding for a phase II demonstrator project.
The central aims of the phase II project are:
The key objective is to build a demonstrator focussing on the UK which will illustrate the cross-searching of
The demonstrator will have a simple query interface, including a map-based search facility, that allow users to search for geo-spatial data and resources by subject/topic, date, resource type and, most importantly, geographic location. The demonstrator will use the Z39.50 Protocol for searching and record retrieval using the GEO Profile and Bath Profiles. The project will look at ways in which data can be kept up-to date, and what kind of quality assurance on data input will be required, including the provision of web based interfaces for online updating.
Part of the project work will include assessing the needs of the various stakeholders for a full portal service and to promote the possibilities of a fully functioning service through focus groups and demonstrations at conferences etc. In addition the project will develop relationships with relevant initiatives in geo-spatial searching, specifically the NGDF and the RDN Geography and Environment Hub. Finally there are a number of technical aspects to investigate including the use of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to disclose metadata, how access could be provided to 'deep' geo-spatial resources (data mining) and how a service might be widened to include functions to support the visualisation, exploitation and analysis of geo-spatial data.
The project is a joint one with the History Data Service and runs from May 2002 to June 2003.
e-MapScholar, which began in January 2001, aims to develop tools and learning and teaching materials to enhance and support the use of geo-spatial data currently available within tertiary education in learning and teaching, including digital map data available from the EDINA Digimap service. e-MapScholar proposes to enhance the usability and learning potential of spatial data resources, that already exist within the tertiary education sector, by developing three sets of new resources: Teaching Case Studies, Software Tools and Customisable On-line Tutorials and a Virtual Placement. The project is funded by the JISC to form part of the JISC IE and works closely with other projects funded under the same programme.
The project is now progressing well.
Ten JISC funded Teaching Case Studies have been commissioned. To date, six of these case studies have been received and are available online. At the time of writing this report, this URL has not been made public, as the project is still awaiting advice from Ordnance Survey on which Case Studies can be made available outside the login and the copyright licence number to be applied to images within them. A number of other case studies are being funded directly by OS.
The prototype e-MapScholar online Learning Resource Centre and Content Management System have been demonstrated at a number of events. Both systems have been very well received and the project has been very encouraged, both by the compliments received and by the indication that the work undertaken may well have potential for development into new directions. The teams are now working on getting six fully functioning Learning Resources into the Learning Resource Centre in time for beta testing and evaluation work at five institutions in the autumn of 2002.
A novel aspect of the learning resources is the way maps are rendered within the units. The maps are being delivered live from the EDINA Digimap service using the OpenGIS Consortium Web map server interface specification. Digital map data, formatted in GML (Geography Markup Language), can also be streamed from Digimap directly to interactive tools or to the e-MapScholar server for processing and thence to an interactive tool. This mechanism will permit the customisation of the geographic examples given in the units to those areas the tutors think most suitable for their students.
Work began during the summer of 2002 on the final work item, the virtual work placement. A literature review has been completed and a case study located. The partner organisation is the Macauley Institute in Aberdeen. The virtual placement is currently being storyboarded. Work on an online version, incorporating Digimap, will commence in September.
Together with MIMAS and Becta we undertook the National Learning Network (NLN) Learning Materials Delivery Project. Under this project EDINA dual hosts the Content Access Tool (CAT) and NLN materials and is responsible for the establishment of a user support model which has earned the respect of the NLN Materials Development and Implementation Team (NLNI-MDIT) at Becta and works in close contact with the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs). EDINA now has contacts in every RSC, to whom regular information about developments in the NLN service is sent, and from whom enquiries are received and actioned by the helpdesk and Training and Liaison Support Officer.
EDINA is responsible for two of four projects in the JOIN-UP Programme, a cluster of projects funded under the infrastructure part of the JISC DNER Programme. These four individual projects have been combined with a view to each contributing separate but compatible, and inter-operable, component parts to the four-part DNER structure of Discover/Locate/Request/Access. Thus JOIN-UP addresses the linkage between references found in discovery databases (such as Abstracting and Indexing (A & I) databases and Table of Contents databases) and the services that provide the full-text material (typically journal articles), in printed or electronic form. The three lead partners in the JOIN-UP Programme are EDINA; Docusend (led by King's College, London, in partnership with the LAMDA electronic document delivery service); and the British Library.
The Xgrain project has developed a broker for cross-searching abstracting and indexing services and electronic tables of contents services within the JISC Information Environment. Xgrain facilitates discovery of journal articles from bibliographic services thus fulfilling the first function of a joined-up journals service. A simple Xgrain interface for shallow searching makes abstracting and indexing databases more accessible for learning and teaching. Xgrain will also facilitate use of these bibliographic services in learning and teaching by providing a range of documentary materials and including 'content-level' descriptions within the service. The documentary materials have been commissioned and will be available by the end of 2002. Content-level descriptions will be included in the service during 2003.
ZBLSA has developed a linking tool that provides portals with the means to locate services pertaining to journals. ZBLSA connects discovery of a reference to a journal article with services providing the most appropriate full-text copy in printed or electronic form. The main client communities of ZBLSA are the A&I database services that operate at the JISC datacentres and the RDN subject portals. They will use ZBLSA to locate services on journal articles whose existence has been discovered in other ways. ZBLSA is lightweight and business neutral. It operates on existing permissions so is not involved in authorisation or authentication. It simply directs end users to appropriate services providing journal articles. ZBLSA will be a primary mechanism for directing end-users from the UK tertiary education sector to publisher web sites. EDINA is currently working to ensure that a critical mass of content is available via ZBLSA by working with service providers to implement the ZBLSA rights evaluation scheme.
Television and Radio Index for Learning and Teaching (TRILT): EDINA was awarded funding to provide development and delivery of the TRILT, a British Universities Film and Video Council 5/99 project, in February 2001. Work on developing a user interface and implementing a database has continued throughout 2001/02.
Over the past year EDINA has continued with our programme of familiarisation and liaison work with the FE sector Through the NLN Project referred to under 'Projects' EDINA has developed close links with the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs). Project staff also liaise closely with the FE Focus Group at the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS), with whom a workshop for RSC staff was planned during the period covered by this Annual Report (and held in September 2002). The NLN Project Manager and Training and Liaison Support Officer attend the meetings of the CETIS FE Focus Group, and contribute to the work of the Group in any way that they can. Through the meetings of this Group we have established contact with Learning and Teaching Scotland, and the Learning Skills Development Agency.
In July 2001, EDINA, opened an office in St Helens College on Merseyside, in the Centre for ICT Developments at the Town Centre Campus. This innovative example of 'outreach' is aimed at helping EDINA understand how to enhance our services for the diversity of need in the post-16 sector. Two members of staff are based there: the Learning and Teaching Projects Co-ordinator and the Learning and Teaching Projects Officer. A further L&T Projects Officer is being recruited, with primary responsibility for providing training and liaison support for NLN.
As well as its activities in providing both Higher and Further Education programmes, St Helens creates online learning resources for staff development and for use in learning and teaching. St Helens was awarded Accredited Status by the Further Education Funding Council (replaced by the Learning and Skills Council).
St Helens College works closely with EDINA in trialling potential new services and we submitted a joint bid for funding to the Exchange for Learning (X4L) Programme Strand A. EDINA is constantly seeking fresh opportunities for engagement with St Helens and is continuing work reported last year in facilitating new liaison projects for the University of Edinburgh with regard to inclusion targets.
FE staff are taking part in Steering Committees of JISC projects at EDINA, developing learning and teaching materials.
EDINA staff attended the FERL 2001 conference, November 2001.
New flyers have been designed to promote EDINA services to FE. As part of the Digimap in FE project, RSC NW arranged a workshop for invited colleagues from a number of colleges in the NW to see the Digimap service, and be introduced to the online learning materials being developed by the e-MapScholar project. This workshop was held at St Helens College on 23 April 2002, and was very successful, both in terms of the contributions made by the staff to the project, but also in making new contacts with college staff in the NW region.
A meeting was held at St Helens College on 22 January 2002 between members of staff from EDINA and MIMAS, NW RSC and JISC. Andy Wistreich, JISC RSC Liaison Manager, and Susan Eales, JISC FE Content Manager, attended the meeting, whose purpose was to establish links between the data centres and NW RSC, and to discuss potential user support models involving the RSCs for the NLN project. The meeting was very successful and close links have been maintained between EDINA staff and NW RSC. The manager of NW RSC now attends the operational meetings of the NLN project, representing all RSC staff at these meetings. The manager has reported to the meetings that his RSC, and other RSCs, have found the EDINA helpdesk staff and the Training and Liaison Officer to be unfailingly helpful in assisting them with NLN queries.
The NLN Project Manager has been told by many RSC staff, and other FE contacts, that the establishment of the office at St Helens College has demonstrated to them more clearly than anything else our wish to engage with FE. They also appreciate our attempts to widen our portfolio with sources of relevance to FE.
JISC have funded a one year pilot project from July 2001, the objectives being:
Seven FE colleges based throughout Britain, selected to represent the diversity of FE colleges, were trained in July 2001, given full access to Digimap and access to support through the EDINA helpdesk. In addition, the colleges have been encouraged to produce teaching materials demonstrating the use of Digimap in FE Education. An interim report was sent to JISC and OS in February 2002 and a Digimap workshop was run in conjunction with the North-West Regional Support Centre for interested colleges. A full report of the evaluation will be made available to JISC in October 2002.
A list is given in Appendix 6.
The Data Library, as a host of EDINA BIOSIS and other life science services, is a partner in E-BioSci, a three-year EU Fifth Framework project led by the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). E-BioSci is an initiative to set up a platform that will provide services relating to access and retrieval of digital information in the life sciences, ranging from bibliographic or factual data to published full text. Its objectives are to explore technologies and protocols that will permit the establishment of a European-based research infrastructure of global significance and, where appropriate, to act in a co-ordinating capacity to achieve these goals. The Data Library role, with BIOME as an associate partner, is to build the UK node for the portal to facilitate cross-searching and to host E-BioSci specific databases. Following project planning activity during 2000/2001 the EU has endorsed the project and started in December 2001. This is also an opportunity to link the JISC IE with European initiatives: E-BioSci activities have relevance to the Xgrain and ZBLSA work carried out by EDINA under the JISC IE programme; the JISC Collections Manager is a member of the E-BioSci Governing Body.
For many years Data Library staff have been active members of the International Association of Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST), 'an international organisation of individuals who are engaged in the acquisition, processing, maintenance and distribution of machine-readable text and/or numeric social science data'. The membership of IASSIST, which was founded some 20 years ago, includes information system specialists, database librarians or administrators, archivists, researchers, programmers and managers. Peter Burnhill is immediate past President, Alison Bayley is Assistant Treasurer and Robin Rice chairs the IASSIST Web Site Committee of which Stuart Macdonald is a member. IASSIST holds an annual conference in the USA or Canada for three years out of four and in Europe in the fourth year. The 2002 conference was held in The Roper Center and The Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut, USA. 2003 conference will be held in Ottawa, Canada.
The EDINA Steering Committee is chaired by Derek Law, Librarian and Director of Information Strategy at Strathclyde University. The Committee includes representation from the JISC, MAU, UKOLN, JIBS User group, and Edinburgh University, as well as individual members of the UK academic community.
The EDINA Management Group meets under the chairmanship of Richard Field, Vice Principal, Academic Services & Information Strategy, to consult and advise the Director about the general direction and strategy for EDINA. The University's Librarian and its Director of Computing are also members.
A statement of expenditure for 2001/2002 is given in Appendix 4.
In planning for the future, EDINA has a number of challenges and opportunities consistent with its mission and strategic aims.
The first is associated with services in the 'traditional' area of the 'digital library'. For this, EDINA will seek to add to its portfolio of specialist bibliographic datasets, going beyond this to establish its role with respect to services which help users locate, request and access services on the full text of articles.
A second major challenge for EDINA is to expand its research data and geographic data services - 'to put data into the digital library'. This has been a continuing challenge for EDINA and the Data Library, reflecting international concerns on how best to provide researchers with access to research data.
Being based in the Data Library, EDINA has an extensive understanding of the needs and support requirements of users with regard to research data. However, the experience of the Digimap service is that these resources can be made accessible to a much wider constituency, motivating widespread IT literacy as well as the adoption of 'information skills'. A good working relationship has been developed between EDINA/Data Library and a variety of research data providers, and we plan to build on this.
We will continue to pay particular attention to the needs of the Further Education sector and the demands of life-long learning, building on our relationship with LTSN, RSCs and others in the JISC IE to exploit existing and new resources for learning and teaching. Our efforts continue to address the issue of how EDINA's services can enhance its productivity in learning and teaching. In addition, attention will be paid to relevant content for Further Education, as well as Higher Education. This includes, where appropriate, assisting in the 'rescue' of services resources that have outgrown their current set-up, and bringing them into the JISC IE. We shall also continue and intensify work on the JISC IE infrastructure, in particular with respect to the discovery and location of journal literature. 'Technology Watch' and interoperability continue to be important and help us keep abreast, assess and make appropriate use of new developments, such as OpenURL and SFX, the Open Archives Initiative and the newly emerging Z39.50 New Generation (ZNG). We will draw on and seek to expand our relationship with representatives from the DOI Foundation and the Cross-Ref Initiative. Our membership and role in the Association of Subscription Agents and Intermediaries (ASA) will continue to assist us in this process.
A further challenge, and opportunity, is that posed by the emergence and importance of sub-UK and regional focuses of activity. The development of most relevance to EDINA is clearly that of the Scottish Parliament, following on that of the creation and policy operation of SHEFC. EDINA is increasingly being approached to act as the Scottish Datacentre, as it has the requisite range of resources and experience in providing on-line data services, and has some guarantee of continued existence. This is reflected, for example in further development plans for the Statistical Accounts of Scotland service and for SALSER.
Small scale development of Digimap will continue with plans for an upgrade to the web service, and the enhancement of the data downloader service. As we reported in last years Annual Report, the task of data management has proved to be a large undertaking than expected, both in terms of staff time and data storage. We had hoped that having now gone through the cycle three times, the process should be more 'normal', however this has not proven to be so. OS changing the specification of its data products and having problems with timely delivery exacerbates the problem. Moving data loading and processing to another EDINA machine has reduced processing time considerably but, more importantly, also means we are no longer impacting on the performance of the live service to users.
The outcome of the JISC funded scoping project to investigate the impact of Ordnance Survey's new product, MasterMap, will be unclear until JISC reports back on the projects findings and recommendations. Ordnance Survey are keen for MasterMap to be included in the service as soon as possible. EDINA believes a more considered approach is required. The JISC are being more cautious still noting that the issue is complex and tied up with the renewal of the data licence with OS (2005-2010) and renewal of the contract to run a service providing OS data to the HE and FE communities (current contract ends Aug 2004). As a consequence, it appears JISC are looking at MasterMap becoming available to HE and FE users from January 2005.
In the meantime, EDINA will be adding a link in the Digimap service to the Developer Programme area of the OS web site. From here users will be able to download sample MasterMap data. At the same time EDINA will be working with OS to investigate cost-effective mechanisms by which the MasterMap data can be incorporated.
Further work will be undertaken on interoperability between EDINA geo-services and other JISC data services. The current EDINA Digimap and UKBORDERS services can be considered human-centric in that, through the web-based client interface, humans initiate web requests to the service. However, in the past year EDINA has implemented several of the OpenGIS implementation specifications. The utility of these protocols lies in their capacity to transparently support 'external service' requests i.e. web services. The result is a set of prototype 'web services' through which we are able to demonstrate how maps and data might be served up to other JISC services and projects.
A series of Web Map Servers have been implemented on top of the Digimap server, one server for each OS digital map product. The e-MapScholar Project has provided the test-bed for these servers. However, before any further progress can be made, permission needs to be obtained from the OS to allow the delivery of 'live' data and maps through EDINA's geospatial web services. Discussions have taken place with the OS and the outcome looks like it will be positive.
Work will continue on the redesign and implementation of a new web interface to UKBORDERS. The existing web interface dates back to 1998 and lacks graphical tools for visualisation of the boundary data and for aerial selection. The new interface will provide both textual (as at present) and graphical methods (via a map based interface) to peruse and select datasets of interest for previewing and download. Allied to this will be the production of enhanced metadata, specified to the ISO 19115 standard. Various look-up tables will also be provided either for download or online interrogation. Hooks to provide interoperability to other services will also be designed to allow the service to 'plug-in' modular functionality from supporting services.
EDINA seeks to play an active role in the 2001 Census roll out. As a data provider and the Geographic Data Unit for the Census, we will take an active role in quality checking the data for the user community. To that end the inclusion of the following additional datasets to UKBORDERS is planned including: the 2001 boundary data; the 1991 Northern Ireland boundary data; varying resolution generalised datasets for teaching purposes, and additional historic boundary data sets supplied by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project (including census boundaries for 1871,1881,1891,1901,1911).
During the coming year, phase II of the two DNER development projects, Geo-data Portal and Geo-Crosswalk will finish. We anticipate that both projects will have a significant affect on how geo-data is thought about within both the DNER and the Higher and Further Education Communities and will raise the profile of the Tertiary education sector within the UK Geographic Information Community.
EDINA is part of a consortium project funded under the New Opportunities Fund's 50 million creation of learning materials programme. This offers a landscape of information complementing related programmes in other sectors including central Government's UKOnline portal, the National Electronic Library for Health, higher and further education's Distributed National Electronic Resource, and learning materials provided through the media and commerce. EDINA is an associate member of the 'Sense of Place - National' consortium which is led by the British
Also of note is that the existing hardware used to support EDINA's services was first in service in July 1996. Replacement of the hardware deployed to support the EDINA Services is proposed during the Academic Year 2002/2003.
In general, the overriding challenge for EDINA will remain that of collaborative interworking with our partners to deliver cost-effective and salient services to our principal 'market': staff and students in UK Higher and Further Education. This includes working with other datacentres, with the RDN faculty hubs and, most notably, with other academic support staff.