1. Director's Introduction

This Review of the 2009-2010 academic year reports to our principal funding body, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and to the world at large. It should give a good overview of what EDINA has been doing. A visit to our website - http://edina.ac.uk/ - would give a better appreciation: to browse across the variety of online services and to look at the high-quality documentation and the case studies on offer. Many services are open-access; others are free at the point of use for researchers, lecturers and students at UK universities and colleges. All are available with 99% assured availability. An up-to-date summary on ‘what EDINA does’, its services and current project activities, is in the Community Report, which you can download from the website.

This past year has been eventful, both in what we have achieved and in terms of the general sense of financial uncertainty for universities and colleges in the UK. The latter has meant re-assessment of what EDINA should do to help institutions save money as well as ‘enhance the productivity’ of their researchers, students and teachers through shared services and infrastructure. EDINA has also been active in supporting the JISC with significant actions to advance the ‘open agenda’, the focus on discoverability (via the JISC/RLUK Resource Discovery Task Force (RDTF)), examination of potential for cost-saving (via the SCONUL Shared Services Business Case), and increase of interest in location-based activity. In its role as a JISC national data centre, the volume of designated service activity at EDINA (in terms of institutional uptake, usage and cost-recovery income) has never been higher. However, with clear signs of decrease in the public purse and the prospect of consequent financial restrictions in JISC funding, we have been using this past year to identify the value that EDINA creates for its user communities, as well as how we can increase our efficiency and effectiveness.

We have been delivering online data services for over 25 years, the last 15 in our role as national academic data centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Demand for EDINA’s services has grown considerably over the past five years, with over 97% of universities and 66% of colleges within the UK having access to one or more of our services. The number of services and their usage has also grown. Key to this success has been effective inter-working with librarians and other academic support staff who give valuable feedback and who promote our services in the colleges, universities and research institutions; we have recently made a start on meeting the needs of the schools sector. Not so obvious to end-users are the middleware services EDINA provides, such as our essential technical support for the UK Access Management Federation and geo-enabling facilities for the UK’s digital library.

More information about our aims and plans for the future can be found in EDINA’s Strategy for 2011-2014.

The following areas are high priorities for future activity:

• An integrated multimedia service, offering economies of scale and value for money for the academic community
• Contribution to the Resource Discovery Taskforce to develop a shared UK infrastructure
• Leadership in the creation of the UK Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), with the UK Location Council, participating in developing the international E-Framework for Education and Research
• ‘Geo-enable’ services across the JISC Information Environment (IE) as well as at EDINA; partner in the development of the academic SDI in Europe; assist UK universities to understand their obligations under the EU INSPIRE regulations
• Provision of the Jorum repository service, for open and licence-restricted educational materials
• Ease and continuity of access to scholarly resources: mobile internet & preservation
• Continue to release middleware and tools to support the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research and provide technical support for members, including schools
• Consolidate and improve upon existing collaborations, e.g. with Mimas, and build new partnerships

It seems timely to end by quoting Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, the present Chair of JISC, as this also sums up the sentiment at EDINA:

‘Standing still is not an option […] we are constantly looking to share best practice, build on what we have learnt and look to the future. So we can deliver products and services which consistently add value to the work going on in UK colleges and universities.’ [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/annualreview/2009.aspx]

P. Burnhill, Director of EDINA