1. Director's Introduction

This review of the past academic year, 2010-2011, serves as report to our principal funding body, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and to the world at large, and is intended to give an overview of what EDINA has been doing. 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 our website, http://edina.ac.uk/

"HE and FE are going through unprecedented changes because of changes of culture, technology and funding sources. EDINA offers both a suite of tried and tested resources and a commitment to serve all its communities in the future." [Professor Charles Oppenheim, Chair of EDINA Management Board]

This past year has been eventful, fruitful but also portentous with respect to things to come. The events and achievements, described in the highlights in the next section, show key areas in which EDINA has been assisting JISC and the sector achieve their objectives. This it does by providing online services for researchers, students and their teachers, and by helping to build the digital infrastructure. Activities include the launch of JISC MediaHub, the definitive academic video, sound and image resource for UK HE and FE, which pioneered a combination of aggregation for discovery with service delivery of licensed content. We are also playing our part in Discovery, the metadata ecology arising from the Resource Discovery Taskforce Vision. The goal of developing the academic Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in the UK and Europe was advanced during the year, including the launch of Digimap OpenStream and ShareGeo Open, the former being enabled by funding from Ordnance Survey for the provision of Digimap for Schools – an example of technology transfer and impact that was awarded the GOLD Certificate for the best overall resource in the Geographical Association’s 2011 Publishers’ Awards.

The launch of OpenDepot.org (as successor to the project-funded Depot) at the start of the year, timed to coincide with the Repository Fringe 2010, signalled the commitment of EDINA to the open agenda. That may have encouraged the significant news at the end of the academic year that EDINA had been given leadership, following a competitive bid, of UK RepositoryNet+ to initiate and manage repository infrastructure for research literature repositories, and the announcement that EDINA would co-host OR 2012. Perhaps of fundamental significance for JISC infrastructure, EDINA and JISC Collections have been assigned responsibility during the past year for the management of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research (the federation). EDINA is providing technical leadership in the Shibboleth development community and significant contribution to the security aspects of providing web services.

We have of course been mindful of both the general sense of financial uncertainty for universities and colleges in the UK and the report from the review of JISC, and of the associated review of the two national academic data centres. The former has prompted reflection on 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. 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, and there may be more call for shared services. However, with clear decrease in the public purse, and prospect of consequent financial restrictions in JISC funding, we must continue to identify the value that EDINA creates for its user communities, as well as how we can increase our efficiency and effectiveness.

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

As "forward look", regarding 2013/2014 as a way-marker to assist determination of planning, we have the following areas as priorities for activity:

• Renewed focus upon the needs of stakeholders (as ‘customers’ of services) to complement the continuing support given to researchers, students and teachers (as ‘consumers’)
• Ensuring ease and continuity of access to scholarly resources
• Contributing to Discovery to develop a shared UK infrastructure
• Leadership in managing the infrastructure for research literature repositories
• Leadership in the creation of the UK Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), with the UK Location Council, helping to develop the international E-Framework for Education and Research
  • "Geo-enabling" services across the JISC Information Environment (IE); partnering in the development of the academic SDI in Europe; assisting UK universities understand their obligations (and opportunities) regarding the EU INSPIRE regulations
• Focus on understanding the mobile Internet and delivery of services to mobile devices
• Using the re-assignment of responsibility for Jorum as trigger for renewed focus upon ways in which EDINA meets the needs of learning and teaching, as well as more generic and technical support for repositories
• Providing middleware and tools, including support through the UK Access Management Federation and technical support for members, including schools

It seems appropriate to close by again quoting the present Chair of JISC, as this sums up the sentiment at EDINA also:

"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]

Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA