5. Forward Look

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In this section:

• Strategic business areas
  • Scholarly communications
  • Geospatial
  • Learning & Teaching
  • Multimedia
  • Access Management

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EDINA operates in a continually changing landscape and there are various technology trends, political drivers and social factors that have impact on it. Some of these drivers that provide context for our business planning include:

• the 'open' and 'free' agendas in software, content and data provision, recognising the 'informal' links between creators of content and users;
• blurring of boundaries between domains, including the business areas of research, education and knowledge exchange themselves;
• the need to offer richer user experiences, arising from the raised level of expectations among end users generated by the GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) services;
• increasing ubiquity of 'web 2.0' services, particularly social networking, user generated content, personalisation services, and services offering remixing of data and data transformations;
• growth of inter-working between mutually supportive partners with compatible aims, both nationally and internationally;
• growing demand for 'anytime/anywhere' computing, with web services, service oriented architectures, repositories and data infrastructures providing the invisible support that responds flexibly to the needs of the community.

Momentum in providing Open Educational Resources (OER) is gathering pace and services supporting open access to journal articles are receiving support from publicly funded sources, including JISC. Global organisations providing free geospatial and multimedia services directly affect the expectations that our users have of our services and us.

Increasing demands on institutional finances are leading to a reduction of specialist support staff at a time when there is growth in awareness and use of complex data, such as geospatial data; and when students, as fee-payers, are likely to demand more support and richer user experiences. Legal issues, including intellectual property rights (IPR), privacy, data protection and provenance affect all working in our business areas.

Six technologies stood out in the 2009 Horizon Report (http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/) as having significant impact on higher education over the next five years, and therefore in what EDINA must do to add value. They are 'mobiles' and 'cloud computing' (becoming established as mainstream over the coming year); 'geo-everything' and 'the personal web' (within the next two to three years); and 'semantic-aware applications' and 'smart objects' (four or five years out). 'Geo-enabling' will become increasingly important, alongside and to support interaction of services with the mobile Internet and the personal web, serving to advance science, scholarship and understanding of cultural heritage, support international engagement, and have real world application in the knowledge economy.

In common with JISC, other JISC-funded organisations, the institutions we serve, and all public sector organisations, EDINA is likely to face funding restrictions in the years ahead. We have committed ourselves to staying relevant to the community, demonstrating the added value that staff and students receive from our services, and focusing on the assistance that we can offer institutions to get through the forthcoming difficult years.

Strategic business areas

EDINA will continue to operate in the following key strategic business areas, each of which has its own external context.

Scholarly communications

We will seek to carry out cooperative work to improve 'discovery to delivery' to achieve greater consensus and coherence, providing added value services on content e.g. shared infrastructure such as link resolvers, providing repositories of open and community-contributed data to support the JISC IE, and further investment in long-term digital preservation services.

Geospatial

We will aim to be active in the academic SDI, with new collections for our communities, extension of services to other sectors, geo-enabling services in the JISC IE, using open datasets to underpin work with international colleagues, delivering services via geo-spatial mobile technologies and providing specialist support services.

Learning & Teaching

We will build on the JISC infrastructure for the sharing of L&T materials provided by Jorum, especially in the forthcoming open repository service, bringing our content to the surface in others' services, user tracking and profiling, and creating rich reports, which are crucial for sustainability.

Multimedia

We will keep an active watching brief on emerging technology and functionality, providing tools upon content, reflecting third party holdings in our portals, using innovative ways to present service-related learning materials, and developing engagement with the user community.

Access Management

We will seek ways to support collaboration across institutions and allow API/'mash-up' experiments with licensed content, including inter-working between service providers; and continuing to provide support for the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research and for inter-federation developments.