2. Highlights of the Year 2009-2010

One event of note, justifying the presence of the Director General of Ordnance Survey (OS), was the celebration of the EDINA Digimap service, ten years on from its launch in January 2000. With international recognition for its continuous innovation, from its early beginnings as an eLib project back in 1996, this is a service that has changed the way research and teaching is done in higher education. In 2009-2010, users created over 3.5 million maps, and downloaded very significant volumes of data [Data representing 660,000 km2 (an area over 2.5 times bigger than the UK) for the high value, large-scale OS MasterMap Topography and 13.8 million km2 (over 56 times bigger) for the OS MasterMap Integrated Transport Network data].

2009-2010 also saw a major upgrade to the Digimap user interface, called Roam, using new technologies to make much more efficient use of its new feature-rich Geographical Information System (GIS) platform that had been procured and installed: offering ‘slippy maps’, improved searching and customisation of maps on the fly.

With encouragement from JISC Collections and OS, EDINA invested considerable effort in customising a simplified and cut-down version of Digimap for use in schools, launched successfully as Digimap for Schools in August 2010.

Multimedia & Education is a fast-developing area. Building on past project and service experience we have been working to offer the definitive academic video, sound and image resource for UK HE and FE: hosting multiple collections licensed or purchased by JISC Collections and aggregating metadata and links to multimedia content held by other collection-owners. This led to the decision by JISC to ask EDINA to combine all the existing collections in the EDINA-hosted services Film & Sound Online and NewsFilm Online with the the newly commissioned collections in the JISC Collections Digital Images for Education project, and the functionality and external collections associated with the JISC-funded Visual and Sound Material Portal Demonstrator project, into a single delivery ‘platform’, Mediahub (working title), with an initial service release scheduled for early 2011.

The launch of the JorumOpen repository in January 2010 to enable sharing of educational materials was a significant achievement for the joint EDINA/Mimas team. Using Creative Commons licences, JorumOpen acts as a showcase for materials produced by UK HE and FE institutions, including those produced under the UKOER Programme managed by JISC and the Higher Education Academy: 6,000 resources had been shared in JorumOpen up to July 2010.

We are now passing the halfway mark in terms of the number of libraries (77) that we anticipate will be represented in SUNCAT, the UK union catalogue of serials, with what is probably over 95% of all serials held in the UK.

During 2009-2010, we introduced functionality to enable researchers to link onwards from journal titles to online access to articles, via tables of contents services, together with links to SCONUL Access, which allows students to apply for reading and borrowing rights at other libraries. Librarians were also helped through automated procedures to assist the UK Research Reserve with de-shelving and print archiving decisions. We were also delighted to play host to Professor Jianyong Zhang, from the National Science Library, Beijing, for a six-month stay to study SUNCAT, PEPRS and the OpenURL Router.

The theme of ‘open’ was very evident in co-hosted events either side of 2009-2010: Beyond the Repository Fringe 2009 in July (following on from the Repository Fringe event in 2008) and Repository Fringe 2010 in September. With an ‘unconference’ feel, this was a showcase for open and repository developments, with internationally renowned keynote speakers. The first Open Knowledge Scotland event enabled representatives of research organisations and universities to meet with local and national government, to share experiences and ideas on the role of open knowledge in teaching, learning, research and service provision. The Depot, the repository service developed for JISC, went global as OpenDepot.org, for use by researchers worldwide; the Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ), which sits behind to re-direct potential depositors, was awarded funds to be re-engineered as a stand-alone re-direct broker for use by other organisations and institutions.

Using web map service technology, we developed Digimap OpenStream, to assist in the uptake of the new OS OpenData Licence datasets made available in April 2010;. This coincided with JISC-funded project work on the development of ShareGeo Open, a repository service for the sharing of geospatial data, as addition to the UK academic SDI. Both are due for launch in early 2010/11.

Of course, not all online content is available under open licences, and an important strategy for JISC and JISC Collections is to secure favourable terms for third-party licensed content, with free-at-the-point of access for authenticated and authorised members of subscribing institutions. For that the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research continues to play a central role, with EDINA responsible for managing the metadata underpinning the federation and supplying technical support to its members: the federation now has over 800 members and 1,000 entities, the largest academic deployment in the world. The SDSS Expert Group at EDINA continues its successful collaboration with Internet2 in order to contribute internationally to the development and maintenance of the Shibboleth infrastructure.

Another major priority during the past year was advancing work to help ensure Continuity of Access to Journal Content, for which EDINA is gaining good reputation nationally and internationally. UK LOCKSS Alliance has developed as a co-operative organisation, with technical support from EDINA whose aim is to ensure continuity of access to scholarly work, and EDINA acted as the Open Access platform for triggered content for CLOCKSS. With the International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) we were successful in building and testing a prototype for an e-journals preservation registry service. We then won funding to roll this out as international facility, and worked with the major preservation agencies. With JISC Collections, we investigated the security and accuracy of post-cancellation access provision. This was all brought together in the e-Journals are forever? workshop in April 2010, jointly-organised with the Digital Preservation Coalition and JISC to identify actions needed at institutional, national and international levels.

A recurrent driver in our work during 2009-2010 has been to contribute to the JISC IE and to the programme of work now identified as the RDTF Vision. Its focus is on discoverability, one major aspect of which is greatly assisted by geo-enabling through Unlock, the shared terminology service underpinning geographic searching and geo-referencing, using text mining techniques devised by the Language Technology Group at the University of Edinburgh to extract place-names from resources and enable collections to be searched by location. This launched an open data gazetteer providing worldwide coverage and including the OS OpenData products in September 2009. The Go-Geo! geo-data portal service, to which over 300 sites now link, is regarded as a critical component of the UK SDI. Its online geospatial metadata creation tool, GeoDoc, enables creators of geospatial data to document them to a variety of standards-compliant schemas.

The UK SDI has been organised as part of the implementation of the EU INSPIRE Directive from December 2009. It is formally known as UK Location and now forms part of data.gov.uk. We are working in partnership with the Scottish Government and the British Geological Survey to develop a pilot geospatial discovery metadata service as a key component of a Scottish SDI, and we work under the auspices of the international E-Framework for Education and Research, founded by JISC and other international partners, in the Geospatial e-Framework Collaboration with Landcare Research, New Zealand.

Last year was also one of synergy, bringing together deployment of Shibboleth for web services and use in operational SDI scenarios, building upon SDSS work and that taken forward with colleagues worldwide in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) University Working Group, chaired by EDINA staff, to build secure OGC Web Services (OWS); laying the foundations to work with vendors of GIS, who aim to modify their client side software to be capable of undergoing the Shibboleth interactions.