EDINA Annual Review 2009-2010

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3. Service and Project Reports

‘...mission to enhance productivity, quality and cost-effectiveness in research and education, with over twenty-five years of experience and technical expertise in data and online services...’

The EDINA website reflects our service orientation, set out to display a thematic view of those services. That view corresponds to our main business areas: Reading & Reference, with a focus on text and scholarly communication; Maps & Data, especially geospatial; Multimedia & Education, the latter including a focus on learning and teaching (L&T). To this we add Middleware & Infrastructure, with a focus on access management and on interoperability and registries. We are also fostering provision for open-access release of material ‘born digital’ within research and education, as well as ways to ensure continuity of access to the resources required by scholarship.

This online service delivery is supported in three ways. First, we support end-users and librarians and information service with documentation, FAQ, helpdesk and train-the-trainer sessions. Second, we ensure a high level of usability, accessibility and reliability in that delivery, complying with standards and meeting agreed performance indicators. Third, we use our expertise and competence in project activity to advance development and understanding, on behalf of JISC and the wider education and research community.

EDINA exists to add value to the work of researchers and students and of teachers and academic support staff by developing and delivering shared services: both improving quality and reducing overall costs in the sector. Determining what would add value and how to be effective in delivery requires knowledge and understanding. Working where possible with leading university researchers, EDINA has been playing its part in shaping the future by undertaking innovative research and development (R&D). For this we derive synergy and strength from the range of business areas in which EDINA is engaged, leveraging expertise from one business area for successful deployment in another area, i.e. across our geospatial, bibliographic, multimedia and middleware areas.

Most service and R&D activities undertaken in 2009-2010 (described below) were funded by JISC. As shown, many project activities undertaken relate to service activities.

Reading and Reference

Scholarly Communication Services and Related Projects

SUNCAT in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
SUNCAT is the national union catalogue for serials providing researchers, students and librarians with an easy facility to discover and locate serials held across the UK. New functionality was added, based on R&D work in the D2D Project, which allows users to link through to the full text of articles via the Tables of Contents for over 20,000 of the journals held in SUNCAT. This uses campus single sign-on authentication via UK federation. And for what is only available on-shelf, students (and researchers) can now use SCONUL Access links to find out easily about access and borrowing rights at other university libraries. Starting with the largest libraries, and therefore including nearly all the journal titles held in the UK, the number of research and university libraries covered reached about half-way, a total of 77 with the addition of seven new libraries. Four were from higher education, bringing the total to 50, including all the Russell Group universities; three were additional specialist libraries: Tate Britain, Wiener Library, Institute of Contemporary History and British Film Institute. We began planning ways in which the smaller libraries remaining could register their holdings.	The strategic value of having a national aggregation of serials information is still being explored: SUNCAT is the UK’s first dedicated national union catalogue of serials. This is illustrated in assistance given to projects for both print and electronic journal content. Automated procedures were developed to assist the print archiving work being carried out by the United Kingdom Research Reserve (UKRR), enabling UKRR members wishing to ‘de-shelve’ a particular title to check the holdings of other libraries. This has saved significant time at each library. Experience with the ISSN Register used within SUNCAT provided a quick start to the PEPRS project for its pilot work for an e-journals preservation registry service and for the PECAN scoping investigation into post-cancellation access (see below). The Discovery to Delivery project lasted only a year and ended in July 2009, but it had brought together staff from the Copac, SUNCAT and Zetoc services to develop links and envisage a common framework, as well as enable new functionality (as noted left).
The Depot and OpenDepot.org in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
Following a successful period of redevelopment, the Depot was re-launched as OpenDepot.org. This means that authors wishing to make their work available on an Open Access basis can do so readily, either by being re-directed to their institutional repository or by direct deposit into OpenDepot. The Depot had been commissioned by JISC to support its RepositoryNet Initiative with the objective of ensuring that there was a national open access repository during the interim period while all universities set up their own institutional repository. That project funding ended but consultations within the open access movement indicated that there was a comparable need on a global stage. Depositors that arrive at the Depot who have existing local institutional repository services are quickly alerted to these and referred onwards to them by the Repository Junction middleware (see Related Project Activities). Prior to the launch of OpenDepot, in the last quarter of 2010, about 6,000 users were re-directed to local institutional repository services in 2009-2010.	The JISC-funded Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project is proving very successful, attracting attention as a deposit broker, assisting potential depositors to ‘do the right thing’ and deposit the authors’ final copy in appropriate institutional repositories. Taking the multi-authored, multi-institutional article as the default – as recommended by SONEX (see below) – assists institutional repository managers, publishers and managers of subject and funder repository. The SONEX group is supported by JISC to foster international collaboration and guide development. Its focus is on deposit opportunities and interoperability between and across repositories: scholarly output notification and exchange. It has defined a set of use case actors and is promoting investigation of use case scenarios by projects internationally. The director of EDINA is one of the four members of SONEX.

SUNCAT in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

SUNCAT is the national union catalogue for serials providing researchers, students and librarians with an easy facility to discover and locate serials held across the UK.

New functionality was added, based on R&D work in the D2D Project, which allows users to link through to the full text of articles via the Tables of Contents for over 20,000 of the journals held in SUNCAT. This uses campus single sign-on authentication via UK federation. And for what is only available on-shelf, students (and researchers) can now use SCONUL Access links to find out easily about access and borrowing rights at other university libraries.

Starting with the largest libraries, and therefore including nearly all the journal titles held in the UK, the number of research and university libraries covered reached about half-way, a total of 77 with the addition of seven new libraries. Four were from higher education, bringing the total to 50, including all the Russell Group universities; three were additional specialist libraries: Tate Britain, Wiener Library, Institute of Contemporary History and British Film Institute. We began planning ways in which the smaller libraries remaining could register their holdings.

The strategic value of having a national aggregation of serials information is still being explored: SUNCAT is the UK’s first dedicated national union catalogue of serials. This is illustrated in assistance given to projects for both print and electronic journal content.

Automated procedures were developed to assist the print archiving work being carried out by the United Kingdom Research Reserve (UKRR), enabling UKRR members wishing to ‘de-shelve’ a particular title to check the holdings of other libraries. This has saved significant time at each library.

Experience with the ISSN Register used within SUNCAT provided a quick start to the PEPRS project for its pilot work for an e-journals preservation registry service and for the PECAN scoping investigation into post-cancellation access (see below).

The Discovery to Delivery project lasted only a year and ended in July 2009, but it had brought together staff from the Copac, SUNCAT and Zetoc services to develop links and envisage a common framework, as well as enable new functionality (as noted left).

The Depot and OpenDepot.org in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

Following a successful period of redevelopment, the Depot was re-launched as OpenDepot.org. This means that authors wishing to make their work available on an Open Access basis can do so readily, either by being re-directed to their institutional repository or by direct deposit into OpenDepot.

The Depot had been commissioned by JISC to support its RepositoryNet Initiative with the objective of ensuring that there was a national open access repository during the interim period while all universities set up their own institutional repository. That project funding ended but consultations within the open access movement indicated that there was a comparable need on a global stage.

Depositors that arrive at the Depot who have existing local institutional repository services are quickly alerted to these and referred onwards to them by the Repository Junction middleware (see Related Project Activities). Prior to the launch of OpenDepot, in the last quarter of 2010, about 6,000 users were re-directed to local institutional repository services in 2009-2010.

The JISC-funded Open Access Repository Junction (OA-RJ) project is proving very successful, attracting attention as a deposit broker, assisting potential depositors to ‘do the right thing’ and deposit the authors’ final copy in appropriate institutional repositories. Taking the multi-authored, multi-institutional article as the default – as recommended by SONEX (see below) – assists institutional repository managers, publishers and managers of subject and funder repository.

The SONEX group is supported by JISC to foster international collaboration and guide development. Its focus is on deposit opportunities and interoperability between and across repositories: scholarly output notification and exchange. It has defined a set of use case actors and is promoting investigation of use case scenarios by projects internationally. The director of EDINA is one of the four members of SONEX.

Continuing Access Services and Related Projects

UK LOCKSS Alliance and CLOCKSS in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
EDINA has been supporting UK LOCKSS Alliance for two years, asked to take on responsibility for transforming a successful project activity (at the Digital Curation Centre) into a sustainable service. We were successful last year in establishing UK LOCKSS Alliance as a self-governing co-operative organisation, with maintenance funding raised by subscription from its 18 members, and securing a three-year grant from JISC for development and community engagement. The goal is to build capacity and collaborative action to ensure continuing access to scholarly work that universities regard as important and at risk. This includes taking advantage of what is done nationally and internationally. EDINA’s role is to provide technical development and programme coordination. EDINA also plays a support role for initiative taken by the University of Edinburgh as one of seven founding libraries in CLOCKSS. Edinburgh is one of the 12 steward libraries in a global network of Archive Nodes. Together with Stanford University Libraries, EDINA acts as a designated Open Access host for ‘orphaned’ journal content when a trigger event is confirmed by the CLOCKSS Boards. To date three sets of content have been released, to test the readiness of the CLOCKSS system and to make journal articles available under Open Access that might otherwise have been lost to global scholarship.	Phase 1 of the Piloting an E-Journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS) project enjoyed good outcome last year, producing a scoping report and prototype that were judged successful by external evaluation, and securing two-year, follow-on funding for Phase 2. The aim is provide librarians and policy makers with information on who is doing what to preserve e-journal content. Working in partnership with the International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) in Paris, PEPRS can check the actions of archival agencies against details of over 66,000 electronic serials held in the ISSN Register. The archival agencies involved in PEPRS thus far include CLOCKSS, e-Depot/KB (National Library of the Netherlands), UK LOCKSS Alliance and Portico, with the British Library set to do so. Towards the end of the year, associated with a presentation at IFLA 2010, there was a flurry of interest from North America, for use of PEPRS for both digitised content and print archiving initiatives. A public beta is scheduled during 2010-2011 with the prospect of a full international service. JISC Collections and EDINA carried out scoping activity last year on the accuracy of post- cancellation access information, and ways to assure end-user access. This was a five-month project called Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of Access via NESLi2 (PECAN), a scoping study which commenced in July 2009. This assessed three facilities: a registry of entitlement (‘a subscription database with history’), a locate facility and a secure UK central archive. Further investigation is intended, with focus on infrastructure needed to ensure post-cancellation access to titles covered by NESLi2 negotiations, and on a practical means to implement licence entitlement.

UK LOCKSS Alliance and CLOCKSS

in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

EDINA has been supporting UK LOCKSS Alliance for two years, asked to take on responsibility for transforming a successful project activity (at the Digital Curation Centre) into a sustainable service. We were successful last year in establishing UK LOCKSS Alliance as a self-governing co-operative organisation, with maintenance funding raised by subscription from its 18 members, and securing a three-year grant from JISC for development and community engagement. The goal is to build capacity and collaborative action to ensure continuing access to scholarly work that universities regard as important and at risk. This includes taking advantage of what is done nationally and internationally. EDINA’s role is to provide technical development and programme coordination.

EDINA also plays a support role for initiative taken by the University of Edinburgh as one of seven founding libraries in CLOCKSS. Edinburgh is one of the 12 steward libraries in a global network of Archive Nodes. Together with Stanford University Libraries, EDINA acts as a designated Open Access host for ‘orphaned’ journal content when a trigger event is confirmed by the CLOCKSS Boards. To date three sets of content have been released, to test the readiness of the CLOCKSS system and to make journal articles available under Open Access that might otherwise have been lost to global scholarship.

Phase 1 of the Piloting an E-Journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS) project enjoyed good outcome last year, producing a scoping report and prototype that were judged successful by external evaluation, and securing two-year, follow-on funding for Phase 2. The aim is provide librarians and policy makers with information on who is doing what to preserve e-journal content. Working in partnership with the International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) in Paris, PEPRS can check the actions of archival agencies against details of over 66,000 electronic serials held in the ISSN Register. The archival agencies involved in PEPRS thus far include CLOCKSS, e-Depot/KB (National Library of the Netherlands), UK LOCKSS Alliance and Portico, with the British Library set to do so. Towards the end of the year, associated with a presentation at IFLA 2010, there was a flurry of interest from North America, for use of PEPRS for both digitised content and print archiving initiatives. A public beta is scheduled during 2010-2011 with the prospect of a full international service.

JISC Collections and EDINA carried out scoping activity last year on the accuracy of post- cancellation access information, and ways to assure end-user access. This was a five-month project called Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of Access via NESLi2 (PECAN), a scoping study which commenced in July 2009. This assessed three facilities: a registry of entitlement (‘a subscription database with history’), a locate facility and a secure UK central archive. Further investigation is intended, with focus on infrastructure needed to ensure post-cancellation access to titles covered by NESLi2 negotiations, and on a practical means to implement licence entitlement.

Other Bibliographic Services

We first started to serve libraries and their patrons with SALSER, the serials catalogue for Scottish academic and research libraries, the year before being designated as a UK national academic data centre. SALSER’s scope is limited to Scotland but includes a much more diverse range of libraries and is well used. During 2009-2010 the frequency of updates from libraries improved and two libraries that were listed by name under Research Libraries – Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) and NHS Health Scotland – have updated their records. There was development work on the redesign of the service interface, for launch in December 2010.

Other earlier services have had to be reviewed in the light of changes in the market. Land Life Leisure is a weekly updated digest of press releases, reports and articles in the field of rural information. Last year, Aberystwyth University announced that would cease support of their Land Life Leisure unit which carried out the indexing. However, the subscription base for this niche service remained at around 40 separate university, college and non-academic organisations, including the existing consortium of public libraries in West Wales. During 2009-2010 we carried out the technical work to support community-based indexing, and are encouraged by the contributions from Harper Adams, Pershore, Myerscough and the Royal Agricultural Colleges. Our provision of CAB Abstracts as a weekly updated bibliographic database continues as our only other A&I database. Around 250,000 records were added in 2009-2010 from over 9,000 serial titles, books, monographs, technical reports, proceedings, patents and published theses – reaching six million records. Full text provision also increased, with 70,000 items available as of March 2010. GetRef – a broker for cross-searching abstracting and indexing services and electronic tables of contents services, and a product from the Xgrain 5/99 JOIN-UP project – was withdrawn during the year.

Our e-book offering, the First and Second Statistical Accounts of Scotland, continued as one of the best contemporary reports of life during the agricultural and industrial revolutions in 1790s and the 1830s. Based on contemporary reports of the 938 parishes of Scotland, this is an example of a JISC-funded project that now has a healthy uptake and sustainable future. During 2009-2010 new materials were added to enhance the richness of the published Accounts, bringing together lists of correspondence held in the National Archives of Scotland and the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, material on the original contributors and a link for each Parish to the Gazetteer for Scotland, enabling users to find more information about the parish including entries from Groome’s 19th Century OS Gazetteer of Scotland. Also, during 2009-2010 all schools in Scotland were given access to this historic resource via the Scottish schools intranet Glow, through subscription by Learning and Teaching Scotland.

Additional Project Activity

The EDINA and Data Library division of the University of Edinburgh’s Information Services (IS) department collaborated on the LAIRD project. The aim of this project, internally-funded by income from Full Economic Costs (fEC), is to investigate two-way linkage between research papers and research data. It builds upon development work for Edinburgh DataShare, a data repository service supported by the Data Library, in partnership with the Library and Collections division, who are responsible for the Research Publications Service, the institutional publications repository. There was also work on Case Studies in the Life Sciences: Understanding Researchers’ Information Needs and Uses, funded by the Research Information Network (RIN) and the British Library. This was undertaken at the University of Edinburgh with a team of social scientists and information specialists from the Institute for the Study of Science, Technology and Innovation (ISSTI) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). Its aim was to improve understanding of information use and exchange in the life sciences.

EDINA acted as a support partner for the JISC Programme and Document Repository project led by Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd. This provided consultancy to JISC to develop candidate business processes and a metadata schema for the new JISC repository. The overall aim was to enable JISC to make as much of its project and service outputs as publicly available as possible, all accessible through a single central repository. EDINA led on the definition of the repository metadata schema and documenting user requirements arising from a series of workshops.

Maps and Data

Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection and Historic Digimap and related projects

Services in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
Over 150 universities and colleges used the Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection, with increased usage among the 43,000 active registered users averaging 27,000 per month. A new mapping facility, called Roam, was launched at the start of 2009-2010, an update on Digimap Classic which was withdrawn in January 2010. Since its launch uptake has greatly exceeded expectations, with over 3.5 million map views. Users downloaded 660,000 km2 of OS MasterMap Topography data, 13.8 million km2 of OS Transport Network (ITN) data, and over 378,000 data files from other OS data products. Digimap Platform: The new GIS Platform for Digimap introduced during 2008-2009 proved robust in meeting the surge in demand during the start of 2009-2010.	JISC commissioned EDINA to investigate the needs of its user community regarding the potential of the mobile delivery of geospatial services using GPS-enabled mobile phones for research and teaching The project, reported at the geomobile blog, included technical evaluation, user engagement and a range of prototype mobile applications. This has greatly improved technical capability and links to other parts of the academic community investing in delivery of mobile-based content. The study revealed gaps in our current service offerings and helped us identify opportunities for new services.
Services in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
Historic Digimap provides access to OS maps of Great Britain from 1843 to 1996. These are increasing in popularity with 74 subscribing institutions and almost 60,000 sessions across the year. This service also benefited from a major upgrade in its user interface in May 2009 with almost 300,000 map views in the last three months of the academic year. Ancient Roam simplifies discovery and selection of maps available for an area, and there is now a timeline to improve switching between different dates. Town Plan data from Landmark Information Group was also released in May. Work on the new Download facility was completed in 2009-2010, to allow users to extract greater numbers of historical maps in a single request. This has already enabled around 55,000 data tiles to be downloaded.	Walking Through Time is project activity to develop a mobile phone app that combines old historic maps with GPS technology, to allow users to ‘walk through time’. Funded by JISC as collaboration with the Edinburgh College of Art, the first phase delivered a prototype that caught the imagination of academics, geographers and historians worldwide. The second phase has concentrated on developing a sustainable platform, to allow the roll out of the application across Britain via the iPhone. Evaluation and testing of a free app took place during the Edinburgh Festival. A related project, AddressingHistory, is creating an online tool to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories with historical maps, many of which have been digitised and made available by the National Library of Scotland, a partner in the project which is aimed at a broad spectrum of users, both within and outwith academia, including local history groups and genealogists. Crowd-sourcing is a particular feature intended to lead to a fully geo-coded version of the digitised directories, as significant added-value.

Services in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

Over 150 universities and colleges used the Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection, with increased usage among the 43,000 active registered users averaging 27,000 per month.

A new mapping facility, called Roam, was launched at the start of 2009-2010, an update on Digimap Classic which was withdrawn in January 2010. Since its launch uptake has greatly exceeded expectations, with over 3.5 million map views.

Users downloaded 660,000 km2 of OS MasterMap Topography data, 13.8 million km2 of OS Transport Network (ITN) data, and over 378,000 data files from other OS data products.

Digimap Platform: The new GIS Platform for Digimap introduced during 2008-2009 proved robust in meeting the surge in demand during the start of 2009-2010.

JISC commissioned EDINA to investigate the needs of its user community regarding the potential of the mobile delivery of geospatial services using GPS-enabled mobile phones for research and teaching

The project, reported at the geomobile blog, included technical evaluation, user engagement and a range of prototype mobile applications. This has greatly improved technical capability and links to other parts of the academic community investing in delivery of mobile-based content. The study revealed gaps in our current service offerings and helped us identify opportunities for new services.

Services in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

Historic Digimap provides access to OS maps of Great Britain from 1843 to 1996. These are increasing in popularity with 74 subscribing institutions and almost 60,000 sessions across the year.

This service also benefited from a major upgrade in its user interface in May 2009 with almost 300,000 map views in the last three months of the academic year. Ancient Roam simplifies discovery and selection of maps available for an area, and there is now a timeline to improve switching between different dates.

Town Plan data from Landmark Information Group was also released in May.

Work on the new Download facility was completed in 2009-2010, to allow users to extract greater numbers of historical maps in a single request. This has already enabled around 55,000 data tiles to be downloaded.

Walking Through Time is project activity to develop a mobile phone app that combines old historic maps with GPS technology, to allow users to ‘walk through time’. Funded by JISC as collaboration with the Edinburgh College of Art, the first phase delivered a prototype that caught the imagination of academics, geographers and historians worldwide. The second phase has concentrated on developing a sustainable platform, to allow the roll out of the application across Britain via the iPhone. Evaluation and testing of a free app took place during the Edinburgh Festival.

A related project, AddressingHistory, is creating an online tool to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories with historical maps, many of which have been digitised and made available by the National Library of Scotland, a partner in the project which is aimed at a broad spectrum of users, both within and outwith academia, including local history groups and genealogists. Crowd-sourcing is a particular feature intended to lead to a fully geo-coded version of the digitised directories, as significant added-value.

Digimap for Schools is a new venture to provide OS mapping for teachers and pupils in schools. This offers easy access to a range of current OS maps, including digital versions of OS’s famous paper maps, the Landranger and Explorer series, as well as the most detailed OS MasterMap mapping and street-level maps showing street names and road-atlas style maps. The technical development work was completed on schedule in February 2010 for launch in August in support of the initiative by OS with 8,000 schools, to encourage the move from print to digital maps. Digimap for Schools is also available as a subscription service via JISC Collections for Schools.

Geology Digimap and Marine Digimap

Geology Digimap provides access to maps and data from the British Geological Survey (BGS). This service has also grown, the number of subscribing institutions increasing to 47, exceeding expectations, and the number of sessions rising to over 30,000. There are now almost 43,000 registered users, of which 17,000 are active.

This has impressed the BGS, who added offshore bedrock and seabed sediment data and 3D models to the collection. With the release of some of the smaller scale data into the public domain, subscription costs were reduced by JISC Collections.
Geology Digimap also had an upgrade in May in the user interface, Geology Roam, with OS mapping as backdrop and the ability to change the transparency of the geology overlays to reveal or hide more or less of the background topographical context mapping. Over 50,000 map views were generated in the traditionally quiet months of June and July alone. Development work during the year will result in new features, such as access from the maps to images of rock types and formations (digitised as part of the JIDI Project).

EDINA also delivers Marine Digimap, for mapping of the UK coastal zone, at various scales and detail, derived from Admiralty Charts. Users can download a feature-rich vector GIS dataset, SeaZone’s Hydrospatial® data, containing ‘topic’ layers on bathymetry and elevation, structures and obstructions, and conservation and environmental protection.

Over 10,000 users from 16 subscribing institutions have registered since the beginning of a service that has appeal beyond those studying marine and coastal environment.
Development work on the user interface will result in an innovative mapping facility for SeaZone’s Hydrospatial data as an improvement over the current raster mapping.

Go-Geo! and related projects

Services in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
Go-Geo! is a discovery service that brings together online resources (of all types) on the basis of location as well as subject, now linked to over 300 sites. This is important for UK education and research and the JISC IE. It is also a critical component of the UK academic SDI and, as a consequence of its interoperable architecture, can also play a part in surfacing academic resources to the broader cross-sectoral community UK SDI –the UK Location Programme’s Location Information Infrastructure (UKLP LII). GeoDoc is the online geospatial metadata creator tool that sits behind Go-Geo! for providers of geospatial data to document their data using standards-compliant schema. The UK academic profile for ISO19115, known as AGMAP, is now aligned with the new national GEMINI2 and European INSPIRE metadata profiles. Over 20 institutions accessed GeoDoc in 2009-2010. Go-Geo! is being re-architected to implement the OGC CSW specification for metadata harvesting in line with INSPIRE and UKLP LII requirements. Mimas Landmap has been added as a new metadata collection cross searched by Go-Geo! Another new metadata collection is about to come online as a result of harvesting metadata from the soon-to-be-launched ShareGeo Open (see below).	EDINA is active in the EU-funded European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (ESDIN) project, with the role to help to develop a best practice network and to evaluate the theory of integrating national SDIs. It is led by EuroGeographic, which represents 52 national mapping and cadastral agencies from across Europe. Relevant work packages relate to technical architecture, metadata, data quality, data schemas transformation and interoperability services. EDINA is contributing expertise gained from experience of delivering geographic information into the academic sector and involvement in the EuroGlobalMap (EGM) pilot. EDINA has formed a partnership with the Scottish Government and British Geological Survey to develop a pilot geospatial discovery metadata service as part of a Scottish SDI, ScotSDI. This addresses obligations under INSPIRE for public bodies to produce, maintain and manage metadata about their geospatial resources. Built using open source software, GeoNetwork, this enables creation and discovery of UK standards compliant GEMINI2 dataset, series and service metadata records. The Geospatial e-Framework Collaboration (GeFC) , part of the international e-Framework for Education and Research started in April 2010. This collaboration with Landcare Research, New Zealand, demonstrates how web services technology, based on international standards, enables interoperability and collaboration across national borders for the benefit of researchers and students.

Services in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

Go-Geo! is a discovery service that brings together online resources (of all types) on the basis of location as well as subject, now linked to over 300 sites. This is important for UK education and research and the JISC IE.

It is also a critical component of the UK academic SDI and, as a consequence of its interoperable architecture, can also play a part in surfacing academic resources to the broader cross-sectoral community UK SDI –the UK Location Programme’s Location Information Infrastructure (UKLP LII).

GeoDoc is the online geospatial metadata creator tool that sits behind Go-Geo! for providers of geospatial data to document their data using standards-compliant schema. The UK academic profile for ISO19115, known as AGMAP, is now aligned with the new national GEMINI2 and European INSPIRE metadata profiles. Over 20 institutions accessed GeoDoc in 2009-2010.

Go-Geo! is being re-architected to implement the OGC CSW specification for metadata harvesting in line with INSPIRE and UKLP LII requirements.

Mimas Landmap has been added as a new metadata collection cross searched by Go-Geo! Another new metadata collection is about to come online as a result of harvesting metadata from the soon-to-be-launched ShareGeo Open (see below).

EDINA is active in the EU-funded European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (ESDIN) project, with the role to help to develop a best practice network and to evaluate the theory of integrating national SDIs. It is led by EuroGeographic, which represents 52 national mapping and cadastral agencies from across Europe. Relevant work packages relate to technical architecture, metadata, data quality, data schemas transformation and interoperability services. EDINA is contributing expertise gained from experience of delivering geographic information into the academic sector and involvement in the EuroGlobalMap (EGM) pilot.

EDINA has formed a partnership with the Scottish Government and British Geological Survey to develop a pilot geospatial discovery metadata service as part of a Scottish SDI, ScotSDI. This addresses obligations under INSPIRE for public bodies to produce, maintain and manage metadata about their geospatial resources. Built using open source software, GeoNetwork, this enables creation and discovery of UK standards compliant GEMINI2 dataset, series and service metadata records.

The Geospatial e-Framework Collaboration (GeFC) , part of the international e-Framework for Education and Research started in April 2010. This collaboration with Landcare Research, New Zealand, demonstrates how web services technology, based on international standards, enables interoperability and collaboration across national borders for the benefit of researchers and students.

ShareGeo and ShareGeo Open

EDINA has pioneered strategies for sharing resources within the limitations of third-party licence with the ShareGeo repository, building on experience with Jorum (see next section). 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 be prohibited.

In April 2010, OS made a suite of core geospatial data products available as OS OpenData, with Creative Commons Attribution licence terms conducive to sharing and reuse of derived data via open repositories. Throuh ShareGeo Open, an open access repository, researchers, students and lecturers will be able to create geospatial data to deposit their research and operational data in a repository that will be open to all to search and download. ShareGeo Open is being seeded with sample data in preparation for general availability in the autumn of 2010.

UKBORDERS

UKBORDERS provides access to and support for a large online ‘filing cabinet’ of digitised boundaries and key postcode directories and related resources. Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as the Geography Data Unit for the Census Programme, UKBORDERS was accessed with nearly 30,000 sessions during 2009-2010 by over 4,000 users from 145 institutions. Highlights over the reporting period include the addition of user supplied case studies, the development of Open Educational Resources (OER) as eLearning objects (deposited in JorumOpen – see below); direct support to other ESRC Census Data Units and the use of the UKBORDERS infrastructure to support other ESRC activities such as the Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) project – a network of people who have a shared interest in quantitative methods.

Multimedia and Education

Multimedia Services

JISC has funded EDINA to combine all the existing collections in the EDINA-hosted services Film & Sound Online (FSOL) and NewsFilm Online (NFO) with the the newly commissioned collections in the JISC Collections Digital Images for Education (DIE) project, and the functionality and external collections associated with the JISC-funded Visual and Sound Material (VSM) Portal Demonstrator project, into a single delivery ‘platform’, Mediahub (working title), initial service release scheduled for early 2011. Two workshops have been run, at Edinburgh College of Art and Kingston University to investigate user requirements for Mediahub and supplement previous work in this area.

While this development takes place, Film & Sound Online remains popular, with 382 institutional subscriptions and about 50,000 user sessions. New content from the new Wellcome Film collection will continue to be added to the service until December 2010. Education Image Gallery with 121 institutional subscriptions and about 17,000 user sessions, provided access to some 60,000 images from Getty Images, licensed to the end of September 2010, when they will be replaced by content from Digital Images in Education which has been evaluated by the Digital Images in Education project team in a ‘holding bay’ set up by EDINA.

NewsFilm Online has seen an increase in uptake of 24 registered institutions, up to 330, with over 37,000 user sessions. During the year JISC-funded enhancements were made to the service, which provides access to over 3,000 hours of downloadable television news and cinema newsreels from the ITN/Reuters Archives, by exposing the metadata to Google and other search engines. There was also work to cross-link the Gaumont newsreel records with the BUFVC’s News on Screen database, and to enhance the metadata with geo-place references with a view to developing map-based search and display. Access to NewsFilm Online will continue to be free under the current sub-licence until July 2012, both as the current service and as part of Mediahub from 2011.

Multimedia projects: Tobar an Dualchais and Aggregations of Metadata

EDINA continued to develop the Tobar an Dualchais website in 2009-2010. Based at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic-language college on Skye, Tobar an Dualchais is a multi-million-pound Heritage Lottery-funded project to preserve, digitise and make available online up to 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. EDINA and the University of Edinburgh IS department also contributed a production control and a cataloguing application for web-based input of metadata. The full public version of the website is scheduled for launch in autumn 2010.

EDINA undertook a Scoping Study for Aggregations of Metadata about Images and Time-based Media, a JISC -funded project to support the Resource Discovery Taskforce vision of having a collaborative, aggregated and integrated resource discovery and delivery framework. The project explored what it means to have aggregations of metadata about images and time-based media, to provide insight into the benefits and opportunities, and challenges and barriers to making open collections of metadata available.

Education Service: Jorum

Last year was a very eventful and challenging year for Jorum in its role as a national repository of learning materials, associated with support to JISC and the HE Academy in their joint work to promote and enable sharing as part of the OER Programme. This was marked with the launch of JorumOpen in January 2010, enabling users to share their content using Creative Commons licences. By the end of July 2010 users had shared over 6,000 OERs. This builds on the JorumUK collection which contains items which can only be accessed by licensed institutions, and a cross-search tool was released in June 2010 to search across both JorumOpen and JorumUK collections. Jorum was developed and is run jointly by EDINA and Mimas.

Twitter is proving one of many ways to promote and highlight resources in JorumOpen, and there has been a considerable rise in ‘tweets’ about resources being deposited. Many depositors are using Twitter to highlight their resources, or resources that they have found to be useful. 76% of the resources have been viewed at least once and usage of the most popular resources is rising substantially.

Middleware and Infrastructure

UK Access Management Federation and related projects

Service Activities in 2009-2010	Related Projects in 2009-2010
The Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) Federation Support Team at EDINA plays an important role within the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research: managing the metadata that underpins the federation and supplying technical support to its members. The federation continued to grow substantially, reaching over 800 members. Summer was especially busy in supporting upgrade to Shibboleth Version 2. The SDSS Expert Group contributes, nationally and internationally, to the development and maintenance of the Shibboleth infrastructure and codebase. There was specific attention to the implementation process, improving the WAYF experience and inter-federation working. Nationally, the federation operator refers technical issues related to the operation of the UK federation to the SDSS Expert Group.	During 2009-2010, the SDSS Expert Group worked with Internet2 (I2), participating in the Shibboleth core development team, with core Shibboleth software: Windows-based Quick IdP Installer Revised Discovery Service (next gen. WAYF) Shibboleth V3 IdP The Expert group is working with a small Internet2 subgroup to develop a technical architecture for inter-federation working. The work involves the refinement of an Aggregation Engine to allow the swapping of authorised metadata between federations. WSTIERIA, is a JISC-funded project investigating mechanisms for use of federated access management in a web service environment. WSTIERIA is evaluating possible solutions based on use of façade software and on using recent extensions of core Shibboleth code.

Service Activities in 2009-2010

Related Projects in 2009-2010

The Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) Federation Support Team at EDINA plays an important role within the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research: managing the metadata that underpins the federation and supplying technical support to its members. The federation continued to grow substantially, reaching over 800 members. Summer was especially busy in supporting upgrade to Shibboleth Version 2.

The SDSS Expert Group contributes, nationally and internationally, to the development and maintenance of the Shibboleth infrastructure and codebase. There was specific attention to the implementation process, improving the WAYF experience and inter-federation working. Nationally, the federation operator refers technical issues related to the operation of the UK federation to the SDSS Expert Group.

During 2009-2010, the SDSS Expert Group worked with Internet2 (I2), participating in the Shibboleth core development team, with core Shibboleth software:

Windows-based Quick IdP Installer
Revised Discovery Service (next gen. WAYF)
Shibboleth V3 IdP

The Expert group is working with a small Internet2 subgroup to develop a technical architecture for inter-federation working. The work involves the refinement of an Aggregation Engine to allow the swapping of authorised metadata between federations.

WSTIERIA, is a JISC-funded project investigating mechanisms for use of federated access management in a web service environment. WSTIERIA is evaluating possible solutions based on use of façade software and on using recent extensions of core Shibboleth code.

Unlock service and related project

Service in 2009-2010	Related Project in 2009-2010
Unlock, the gazetteer and geo-referencing infrastructure service, provides two sets of web services: a ‘gazetteer cross-search’, comparing different sources of geographic data for information about place-names a ‘geo-parsing’ service, using text mining techniques to extract place-names from resources (text or metadata) to allow collections to be searched by location. Unlock Places offers search across licensed OS data sources for subscribers to Digimap OS Collection. Last year Unlock was adapted to include an open data gazetteer, which provides world-wide coverage and includes the OS Open Data products. In terms of the JISC IE, Unlock is a shared terminology service that can underpin geographic searching and geo-referencing for other services. Unlock can help with data and resource linking and improving the metadata describing scholarly work.	CHALICE is a JISC-funded project to create an historic placename gazetteer for the UK, publish it as Linked Data as one of other widely-used sources of placename reference information on the semantic web e.g. geonames.org. It will add deep historic coverage (back to Anglo-Saxon charters) to the UK gazetteer. The project uses Named Entity Recognition techniques to extract placename and timescale reference information from the digitised English Place Name Survey, to generate new placename authority files. It uses the Edinburgh Geo-parser to ‘geo-resolve’ place-names listed in authority files and link them to other geographic entities on the Linked Data web. CHALICE will develop a simple web interface to annotate and correct the gazetteer data and semi-automatically created links to other entities on the semantic web and will create a short series of case studies demonstrating use of the gazetteer and its potential application to other, similar archives and services.

Service in 2009-2010

Related Project in 2009-2010

Unlock, the gazetteer and geo-referencing infrastructure service, provides two sets of web services:

a ‘gazetteer cross-search’, comparing different sources of geographic data for information about place-names
a ‘geo-parsing’ service, using text mining techniques to extract place-names from resources (text or metadata) to allow collections to be searched by location.

Unlock Places offers search across licensed OS data sources for subscribers to Digimap OS Collection. Last year Unlock was adapted to include an open data gazetteer, which provides world-wide coverage and includes the OS Open Data products.

In terms of the JISC IE, Unlock is a shared terminology service that can underpin geographic searching and geo-referencing for other services. Unlock can help with data and resource linking and improving the metadata describing scholarly work.

CHALICE is a JISC-funded project to create an historic placename gazetteer for the UK, publish it as Linked Data as one of other widely-used sources of placename reference information on the semantic web e.g. geonames.org. It will add deep historic coverage (back to Anglo-Saxon charters) to the UK gazetteer.

The project uses Named Entity Recognition techniques to extract placename and timescale reference information from the digitised English Place Name Survey, to generate new placename authority files. It uses the Edinburgh Geo-parser to ‘geo-resolve’ place-names listed in authority files and link them to other geographic entities on the Linked Data web.

CHALICE will develop a simple web interface to annotate and correct the gazetteer data and semi-automatically created links to other entities on the semantic web and will create a short series of case studies demonstrating use of the gazetteer and its potential application to other, similar archives and services.

OpenURL Router

OpenURL Router continued to have high levels of use during 2009-2010, with 95 registered institutions which register the OpenURL resolvers they use with the Router. The OpenURL Router is a central registry detailing OpenURL resolvers, the institutions to which they belonged, and certain details (UK Federation identifiers, IP addresses and domain names) that help in identifying members of that institution. This allows referring bibliographic services to address OpenURL links to the correct resolver for each end user, without any prior knowledge of the user or their institution.

Projects

Last year, in response to the demand for Shibboleth WAYFless URLs, EDINA carried out preparatory work and development of a new flexible and simple authentication mechanism, part of the ediauth framework, for institutions to link their users directly to an EDINA service, to the benefit of their end users. The new system, to be rolled out in 2010-2011, will provide a persistent and more informative alternative to Shibboleth WAYFless URLs which are complex and inconsistent to formulate, unstable, and also by-pass important service information on the EDINA main web site. It will cater for Shibboleth and the other methods of authenticating such as IP address recognition.

As part of the JISC-funded work on personalisation, EDINA developed two service-quality demonstrators, both shared middleware:

MyGeo, a proof-of-concept middleware service for storing information about a user’s location; other services and devices can either update that information or access it. By helping applications use location more effectively, MyGeo supports service personalisation by making search and discovery of resources more locally aware and relevant.
CRIS, short for ‘Commenting and Referencing Infrastructure Service’, a reference-linking shared middleware service, with a focus on multimedia resources. A service such as this would help service-providers avoid duplicating implementation of the functionality in individual services and could be the basis for recommender functionality. CRIS was embedded in a development version of the Visual and Sound Materials portal.

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