2. Highlights in our Year, 2008/2009

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In this section

• Providing Managed Access to Licensed Resources
• Open Access to Community-Generated Content
• Tools to Help Ensure Continuity of Access to Scholarly Output
• Other Highlights

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With a mission to enhance research, learning and teaching in the UK, our principal task is to innovate by developing and delivering first-rate online services. This we do; in 2008/2009, we hosted 22 national services, some as managed access, with over 500 institutions holding licences to use at least one EDINA service, and increasingly we host services that support open access. In terms of market coverage, we deliver 'non-open access' to almost all universities (over 97%) and to two-thirds of colleges within the UK. Another way of gauging success is to calculate the total number of institutional licences issued for EDINA services: in 2008/2009, these rose to 1565 (from 1550 and 1300 in the two previous years), due mainly to the launch of the popular NewsFilm Online service (see below). Looking beyond institutional licensing, EDINA has made a significant contribution during 2008/2009 to the significance of the growth of open access and community generated content for research, learning and teaching.

It is therefore indicative that EDINA started and ended the academic year by co-hosting a JISC-funded Repository Fringe event, together with Information Services colleagues in the Digital Curation Centre and the Library and Collections Division, as well as UKOLN, EPrints and the University's School of Informatics. Over 80 delegates attended the event on 31 July /1 August 2008, with two plenary speakers, Dorothea Salo (University of Wisconsin) and David De Roure (Southampton); short 'Soapbox' parallel sessions; 'Group Improv' sessions (provoking audience participation) and 'An Audience With...' presentations. The second event, Beyond the Repository Fringe 2009, closed the year, on 30/31 July 2009. Keynote speakers were Ben O'Steen and Sally Rumsey (Oxford University Library Services), and Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information).

With talk of a UK research data service, it is also worth remarking on the gathering of friends and colleagues from near and far, to celebrate 25 years of the Data Library through seminar and social hospitality on 5 December 2008. It was Edinburgh University Data Library that the University put forward and was initially designated as a national academic data centre, before we renamed it EDINA at its launch. As all remarked, 'knowing how to do data' is now acknowledged as a key set of skills, with the Data Library having a 'practitioner's' advocacy role through DISC-UK and DataShare. It forms part of the 'EDINA and Data Library' unit within Information Services at the University of Edinburgh to support their staff and students in discovery, access, use and management of research datasets.

Providing Managed Access to Licensed Resources

The JISC data centres were established to enable shared access to third-party licensed content. The start of the academic year saw the final changeover for most EDINA services in the way that access is managed, through use of Shibboleth in the UK Access Management Federation, away from using Athens as the mode of authentication. The changeover was challenging, with most institutions making a smooth transition (especially those who had considered the issues in good time) in their responsibility for authentication, and revocation. EDINA played an essential part in the national transition, first in the R&D work that tested Shibboleth in a pilot federation, and then through its role as technical operator and metadata manager for the community, working with the designated federation operator JANET(UK) with whom there is now a Memorandum of Understanding. The UK Federation is the largest deployment of Shibboleth, with Membership now exceeding 730 (up from 500), with entities (Identity Providers (IdPs) and Service Providers (SPs)) numbering almost 900. EDINA is also a centre of expertise in identity management for JISC. In 2008/2009, the focus was on developing specifications for using Shibboleth in the schools sector and working with international colleagues to define the technical basis for inter-federation operation.

The formal launch of NewsFilm Online (NFO) on 3 October 2008 was another highlight near the start of the academic year. Held in London's Soho Hotel the NFO service was commended by Mark Wood, Chief Executive of ITN and Malcolm Read OBE, JISC Executive Secretary. A long-standing supporter of Newsfilm Online, journalist Jon Snow of Channel 4 News declared his enthusiasm on screen in a video showreel. NFO has enjoyed rapid uptake and success with the user interface provided by EDINA. By 31 July 2009, 306 institutions had registered for the service, which provides access to over 3,000 hours of downloadable television news and cinema newsreels from the ITN/Reuters archives. Over the year there were 27,500 user sessions, 65% in HE and 35% in FE.

Education Image Gallery (EIG), an existing service to H/FE, was also launched in October to the schools sector, as part of the JISC Collections for Schools initiative, funded by Becta. This service provides access to 60,000 images from Hulton Archive, Photodisc and the Getty Images News Service. The service interface was refreshed and updated for all users in January 2009, and picture trails show at a glance the diversity and depth of the resources to be found in the service. The number of H/FE, subscriptions continued to increase, a 10% rise from 2008 to 121. There were over 25,000 user sessions, 83% in HE and 17% in FE.

One less happy event was news in 2009 that as part of the JISC Portfolio Review, JISC has decided to withdraw funding from the Film & Sound Online (FSOL) service. When announced this had implications for its funding for the year 2009-2010, but this would now seem to follow guidelines and withdrawal will be in the year following, 2010-2011. Film & Sound Online is a set of collections of film and video covering a wide range of subjects. This has continued growth in institutional uptake (a 7% rise from 2008 to 382), and in content, with titles from the new Wellcome Film collection being added from February 2009, and three new case studies also added. Over the year there were about 64,000 user sessions, 90% in HE and 10% in FE. Our plan, currently under discussion with JISC, is to seek ways of continuing to offer access to these FSOL collections, perhaps via a single, unified graphical user interface to all the multimedia collections, even with a cut in funding.

November 2008 marked the launch of two geospatial services that made the transition from project into service: Go-Geo! and GeoCrossWalk. These are significant components within the emergent UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Both are good examples of successful innovation, turning the product of R&D into products for use, and this is described in detail in Section 3. Finding good exit strategies and agreement with JISC, or any other funding body, on transition support to test deployment is a fundamental challenge for innovation.

Functionality developed in the GeoCrossWalk project, now branded Unlock, can help with data and resource linking and improving the metadata describing scholarly works. More information about Unlock may be found in Section 3.

There were also changes in 2008/2009 to the Digimap services, some less obvious to the growing user base. (Use of the Digimap Ordnance Survey (OS) Collection continued to grow considerably in 2008-2009, 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 2008-2009 academic session. Users downloaded a quarter of a million data files of Ordnance Survey products in 2008-2009 [this figure excludes the OS MasterMap data]) In particular, the move to OS MasterMap and GML has been relatively smooth; any consternation amongst users about the removal of Land-Line.Plus data in August has proved significantly less than anticipated, as efforts by both EDINA and local support staff to facilitate the transition have paid off. MasterMap Topography Layer is the replacement for LandLine.Plus. Since the launch of MasterMap Download in September 2007, users have downloaded more than one million files of OS MasterMap Topography data, and 11.8 million km2 of OS MasterMap ITN data.

Behind the scenes, the procurement of a replacement Geographical Information System (GIS) map production system for Digimap was completed in June 2008, with Cadcorp Ltd, a UK company, being 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. The switchover to the new platform took place in September 2009, with real improvement in performance and reliability - uptime had dipped below the target 99%, running at 97.45% to 98.85% with the older software that had been deployed since 2001/02.

There was parallel work, using new technologies, on a new mapping facility that users will get to see in January 2010 in a new service called Digimap Roam. This introduces the click-and-drag 'slippy maps' function common to many online mapping services to provide access to twelve fixed-scale map views through which users can zoom in and out. This is available now as a beta and will replace the Classic service.

During 2008/2009 EDINA, in conjunction with JISC Collections and Ordnance Survey, negotiated offering an online mapping facility and a map streaming facility to the schools community. These services should launch early in 2010.

There are three other services in the Digimap Collection. The most popular, with 72 institutions subscribing (up 5 on 2008) is Historic Digimap. Usage rose again with nearly 52,000 sessions across the year. Work to upgrade the mapping interface began in 2008/2009 but that was deferred into 2009/2010 so that advantage could be taken of the replacement of underlying GIS platform for Digimap; it will use the click-and-drag 'slippy maps' function and is expected to allow users to download greater numbers of historical maps in one request.

The number of registered users for Geology Digimap rose dramatically in 2008/2009 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 number of subscribing institutions however has remained at 45.

2008/2009 was the first full year for Marine Digimap, which provides raster marine maps of various scales and detail derived from Admiralty Charts, and allows download of SeaZone's Hydrospatial data - 'Bathymetry and Elevation', 'Structures and Obstructions' and 'Conservation and Environmental Protection' data. About 5,500 users have registered from 16 subscribing institutions.

Open Access to Community-Generated Content

A main thrust of investment by JISC, and by UK universities has been in efforts to foster the emergence of repositories as devices to assist a variety of agenda including the issue of e-prints under terms of open access, with the context set by ever growing sharing across the invisible college and the wider Web 2.0 activity. With the open agenda extending further to learning materials and research data, much of last year, as with the next, has been spent investing in ways that EDINA can deliver added value at the network level. We have designated one of our number as Social Media Officer in order to focus on use of Web 2.0 technologies, assisting developments and ideas into project and service development, with a watch and advisory role on social media tools and trends. There is more information in Section 3 about EDINA's involvement with social media tools and support.

Jorum was the first network-level repositories supported by JISC, in order to enable sharing of online learning materials across H/FE institutions. During 2008-2009, the service has been preparing to support JISC and the HE Academy in their joint work to promote and enable sharing as part of the Open Educational Resources (OER) Programme. The Jorum team, as one of a number of support agencies, provided a Community Bay to provide an area for those with interests in sharing, reusing and repurposing learning resources. Jorum is developed and hosted with Mimas, the JISC-supported national data centre at the University of Manchester.

Keen focus on work to determine the licensing regimes to support OER allowed launch in March 2009 of a tool for early deposits into what is being referred to as JorumOpen. There was also an appraisal of the software platform, which resulted in an implementation of DSpace alongside that of intraLibrary to support all the new service options.

The Depot is being well regarded by advocates of open access. Following the publication of an options appraisal, consultation during March to September determined that the Depot was a network level service that would add significant value in promoting the open access agenda internationally. It was launched as such later in the year to coincide with Open Access Week in October 2009. The project funding from JISC for its development had ended in March JISC as it judged that the Depot had done its job by providing the UK academic community with an online deposit facility for Open Access self-archiving during the interim period while Institutional Repositories (IRs) were being set up. Its 'repository junction' functionality is being generalised as middleware for all repositories to use.

Not all sharing is with 'open' materials, and in many instances open material contains some reference to 'non-open' licensed material from third parties. EDINA has been pioneering the investigation into strategies for sharing within a licensed community through Jorum and with the ShareGeo repository, which was launched in January 2009. Developed in a JISC funded-project, ShareGeo allows users to share and re-use derived geospatial datasets within the Digimap service under the JISC Collections 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. It also provides a potential platform for open access material. During the remainder of 2008/2009, 93 datasets were made available for download, with over 1000 logins and over 500 downloads. As EDINA receives no funding from third parties to operate ShareGeo, this experiment will be reviewed during 2009/2010 as a critical component in the evolving UK academic SDI.

Tools to Help Ensure Continuity of Access to Scholarly Output

SUNCAT provides an important nexus between the open and the tollgate world in scholarly communication, and provides a locus for assessing how to ensure good and efficient current access to journal content with stewardship for access over the longer term. SUNCAT, in its third full year of service as the first national catalogue of serials for the UK, can be regarded as three distinct activities. First, SUNCAT Open provides coherent and ready means for researchers and students to discover and locate serial content across the UK. Two surveys were carried out during the year, one being a follow up of an earlier survey carried out in 2007, finding improvement in satisfaction levels: 92% of respondents experienced good or excellent satisfaction using SUNCAT, attributed to enhancement of the user interface whereby library locations alongside each title in the Results List. The second, SUNCAT Platform, saw the number of contributing libraries rise to 70, and the start of a review of the underlying design and choice of underlying software. The third activity, SUNCAT Strategic, underpinned the variety of projects in which EDINA is currently engaged in three key initiatives geared at ensuring continuity of scholarly content - with particular focus on journal content - over the medium and longer term.

A JISC funded one-year project in 2008/2009 - Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas (D2D) - 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, to launch in Autumn 2009.

EDINA has long-standing expertise in managing e-journal content, playing a leading role in such initiatives as the UK LOCKSS Alliance, CLOCKSS, PEPRS and PECAN (all described further below), and can also assist those with expertise in managing print journal collections, such as the UK Research Reserve (UKRR) initiative.

At the start of 2008/2009 EDINA agreed to take on support for the UK LOCKSS Alliance, as this moved from a two-year pilot project mode at the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) into a sustainable service mode. 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. It used the Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) technology in order to ensure that libraries remain central to the process of scholarly information management. It is also preparing to act as a focal point for discussion on the issues of journal preservation and rights management.

EDINA is also acting in a support role for initiative taken by the University of Edinburgh as one of seven founding libraries in CLOCKSS, which moved to full service in 2008 - 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.

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.

It is encouraging that a variety of archiving initiatives are emerging but it is then important to know who is looking after what. PEPRS (Piloting an E-Journals Preservation Registry) is a JISC-funded project, in which EDINA is partnering with the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) International Centre, to scope, develop and test an online facility that will keep track of which e-journals are being kept safe by digital preservation agencies for future use.

At the end of 2008-2009 EDINA joined with JISC Collections and Content Complete to begin a five-month study - PECAN (Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of access via NESLi2) - to scope what is required to support post cancellation access to back copy of e-journal content.

The project envisages two facilities: a registry of entitlement (which has reliable information on the journal content that has been subscribed to by libraries via NESLi2) and a secure virtual archive (providing secure and robust access to back journal content).

Further information about PEPRS and PECAN may be found in Section 3.

Other Highlights

Last year was also a busy one for UKBORDERS, an ESRC funded component in the Census Programme which provides end-user access to a large online 'filing cabinet' of digitised boundaries and the postcode directory to support geo-linking, and now makes this available as a back-end web service (OGC Web Feature Service) to other services. Support for researchers extended to a special derived boundary for the ONS Labour Force Survey (Berrington & Stone, Population Trends, 2009). Attention was also given to the production of eLearning modules: 'Understanding the geography of the UK', and two on accessing and using 'digital boundaries and geographic look up table datasets' - all three deposited in Jorum.

The Geoservices team has continued to advance thinking within the geospatial arena both nationally and internationally with its work on security, semantics, knowledge infrastructures and interoperability. Like many organisations within the UK and the rest of Europe, it is attempting to understand the ramifications for UK academia of the EU INSPIRE Directive which has the intention of opening up to wider use a large number of environmental and environmentally related datasets held by member state organisations. In the UK there is also the government's Location Strategy, which is being implemented through the Location Programme. EDINA has been advising JISC on both of these strategically important initiatives, liaising with the Research Councils and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Higher Education representative on the Location Council.

The Statistical Accounts of Scotland is an 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. 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.

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.

Tobar an Dualchais is a multi-million-pound Heritage Lottery-funded project, which will preserve, digitise and make available online more than 12,000 hours of recordings from the archives of BBC Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland and the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The Tobar an Dualchais project is based at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic-language college on Skye. EDINA and the University of Edinburgh Information Services (IS) were contracted in 2007 to produce a Production Control Application and a Cataloguing Application (for web-based input of metadata) and EDINA will develop and host the Online Service and Searchable Catalogue. An initial prototype of the new Tobar an Dualchais website, was made available for user testing in July 2009.

In 2008-2009, EDINA applied design project management and usability testing in the visual design stage to inform the production of new interfaces for EIG, NFO, Digimap ROAM and Tobar an Dualchais. Short online training sessions were introduced, using a web conferencing service that enabled more frequent interaction with site representatives across the UK than is possible with face-to-face training alone.