APPENDIX 1: EDINA Services and Project Activity

Services

Reading and Reference

Article References

CAB Abstracts

Bibliographic database compiled by CAB International. Covers the significant research and development literature in the fields of agriculture, forestry, certain aspects of human health, human nutrition, animal health and the management and conservation of natural resources.

Land Life Leisure

Covers current developments in agriculture and all rural topics, conservation, estate management, forestry, horticulture, recreation and tourism. The database originates from the academic and research communities mainly from Aberystwyth, with contributions from five other land based colleges.

Journal Catalogues

SUNCAT

The UK national catalogue of serials. It has two principal aims: to be the key resource for locating serials titles in UK research libraries, and to be a source of high quality records to help upgrading of local catalogues.

SALSER

The union catalogue of serials holdings for Scottish universities, the municipal research libraries of Edinburgh and Glasgow, numerous smaller Scottish research libraries and the National Library of Scotland. Through SALSER, users can not only discover which serials are held where; they can also connect to the participating libraries' catalogues for more detailed holdings information.

E-books

Statistical Accounts of Scotland

The online version of the full text of two complete surveys of Scottish parishes conducted in the 1790s and 1830s, published as the First and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland. Together they provide a record of many aspects of life in Scotland at the time.

Deposit Academic Papers

OpenDepot.org

An international facility to deposit peer-reviewed papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints).

E-Journal Preservation

UK LOCKSS Alliance

An international initiative to ensure libraries remain central to the process of scholarly information management. The UK LOCKSS Alliance is a cooperative movement of UK academic libraries that are committed to identify, negotiate, and build local archives of material that librarians and academic scholars deem significant.

CLOCKSS

An international preservation scheme for scholarly publications based on a distributed long term archive network of publishers’ current and past content. The content is stored in secure LOCKSS-managed storage under the stewardship of globally distributed research and university libraries.

Middleware Services

OpenURL Router

Designed to help service providers solve the appropriate copy problem by routing an OpenURL query to the OpenURL Resolver being used by a given user’s institutional library. The OpenURL Router links bibliographic services to full text via OpenURL Resolvers.

Maps and Data

Geo-data Portal

GoGeo

The place to start to discover geospatial information and services for education and research. GoGeo enables users to find data, geospatial services and resources, learn about geospatial metadata and access tools to create and publish standards-compliant geospatial metadata.

Maps and Datasets

Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection

Delivers Ordnance Survey map data to UK HE and FE. Data is available either to download to use with appropriate application software such as geographical information systems or computer aided design, or as maps generated by Digimap online. Allows users to view and print maps of any location in Great Britain at a series of predefined scales. Advanced tasks that Digimap enables are downloading map data for use, for example, in geographical information systems software on a user’s own desktop; advanced cartographic tasks, such as user-specified scale, combining datasets on a map, large format printing; gazetteer functions on place names, postcode area and attribute look up.

Historic Digimap

Offers historic Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain to UK HE and FE. The maps have been generated by Landmark Information Group. The collection includes maps at a range of scales published between 1843 and 1996. From Historic Digimap it is possible to print maps and download them as georeferenced images for use in geographical information systems or image processing software. The facility also allows users to view up to four maps simultaneously thereby showing changes over time.

Geology Digimap

Delivers geological maps and data from the British Geological Survey (BGS). Users can view maps through a web browser, save maps for printing and download the geological map data for use in geographical information systems

Marine Digimap

Provides marine and coastal zone mapping and data products from SeaZone Solutions Ltd. Users can browse, view and print online marine maps and download thematic marine geographical information for use in geographical information systems.

UKBORDERS

The UK Boundary Outline and Reference Database for Education and Research Study offers access to database of UK digitised boundaries. It includes data relating to population census, administrative, electoral and postal areas. The web-based interface provides digitised boundary datasets in many GIS formats for users to download and also hosts historical boundary data relating to the 19th and 20th centuries and contemporary and historical postcode directories.

Agricultural Census Data

agcensus

Delivers agricultural census data for Great Britain as grid square estimates for a geographic area for a particular year at a specified resolution. The spatial distribution of census items for a given region and resolution for a particular year can also be mapped.

Deposit Data

ShareGeo Open

A spatial data repository that promotes data sharing, between creators and users of spatial data. It is the place where researchers, students and lecturers at UK HEFE institutions can deposit data for anyone to download and use.

Web Services

Digimap OpenStream

A Web Map Service (WMS) offering Ordnance Survey OpenData products via an application programming interface (API).

Unlock

Provides a facility to extract and locate place-names found in text documents and metadata. It also provides a search for place-names, locations and shapes across different sources of geographic information

Multimedia and Education

Film, Images and Sound

JISC MediaHub

The definitive academic video, sound and image resource for UK HE and FE developed by EDINA and representing one of three platforms which comprise the JISC eCollections service.

Education Image Gallery

Provides access to a collection of 60,000 images drawn from the vast resources of the Hulton Archive, Photodisc and the Getty Images® News Service (current events and sport), together they cover key events and multiple subject areas including history, entertainment, sport, science, fashion, politics, music, conflict, film, art, leisure and women’s studies.

Film & Sound Online

Collections of film and video, hosted by EDINA and cleared and digitised through JISC’s Managing Agent and Advisory Service (MAAS), who also produced associated metadata. The films are of high quality, and are fully downloadable, either in full or as segments, and can be used freely in learning, teaching and research.

NewsFilm Online

A collection of some 3,000 hours of downloadable television news, cinema newsreels and associated materials, selected from the ITN/Reuters archives including several key cinema newsreels. The content depicts selected events from the last 100 years through contemporaneous media reports and allows users to download and manipulate news footage for their learning, teaching and research.

Learning Materials

Jorum

A national online repository service helping to build a community for the sharing, reuse and repurposing of learning and teaching materials, Jorum supports two services - Jorum contributor; enabling content to be deposited for sharing with others; and Jorum User; providing user access to those resources.

Project Activity

Geo-spatial Projects

A Sense of Place (National) Digitisation Project

An umbrella theme covering separate, still ongoing projects: Collect Britain, and A Vision of Britain through Time, created by the Great Britain Historical GIS (GBHGIS) project.

AddressingHistory

An online tool to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories with contemporaneous historical maps.

Connecting Historical Authorities with Linked data, Contexts and Entities (CHALICE)

A gazetteer of historic UK placenames, linked to documents and authority files in Linked Data form.

Digimap - Alternative Access Scoping Study – Mobile

A scoping study which investigated the potential and the demand for mobile GIS in Higher and Further education and research.

European Spatial Data Infrastructure with a Best Practice Network (ESDIN)

Established by the European Commission to develop a Best Practice Network and to evaluate the theory of integrating national Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs).

Geospatial Engagement and Community Outreach (GECO)

The overarching purpose of GECO is to foster communities of users of geospatial resources (data, services, support). Geospatial, taken in its broadest sense underpins a vast array of academic endeavour - geography represents a fundamental organising axis for information.

Geospatial e-Framework Collaboration between the United Kingdom and New Zealand

A collaboration between EDINA and Landcare Research in New Zealand demonstrating the potential of the Geospatial e-Framework in respect of Geographic Information made available using open geospatial interoperability standards.

GoGeo as Linked Data (GOLD)

The work exposes the GoGeo Catalogue and the Scottish Government Spatial Discovery Portal CSW content as a Linked Data triple store.

Interoperable Geographic Information for Biosphere Study

The IGIBS project is building on prior work demonstrating how Shibboleth (the open source software that underpins the UK Access Management Federation) can be used to provide an organisational model for Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).

Linked Data Focus

An initiative to produce Linked Open Data output from several different EDINA projects and services.

Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure

EDINA has formed a partnership with the Scottish Government to develop a pilot discovery metadata service as a key component of a Scottish Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Spatio-Temporal Energy Efficiency Visualisation (STEEV)

Building a stakeholder engagement tool visualising historic, current and future energy efficiency estimates at the level of individual buildings.

Supporting Personalisation across the JISC Information Environment.

Created two rapid demonstrators for Location-based searching for JISC IE services; and a Shared middleware service of service-content references.

Walking Through Time 2

Walking Through Time (first phase) was a simple idea: "SatNav for historical maps"; a phone app that combines GPS technology with old maps to allow users to 'walk through time'. WTT2 extended the second phase of the Walking Through Time project and concentrated upon developing a sustainable platform to allow for the roll-out the application across Britain via the most popular smart phone platform.

Bibliographic Service Projects

Digital Monograph Technical Landscape Study

A six-month landscape study looking at the issues surrounding the adoption of e-book reader technology to assist with the publishing of scholarly literature, in particular monographs.

Open Access Repository Junction

Developing the Repository Junction from its current simple form contained within the OpenDepot.org, into a stand-alone broker mechanism which can be easily adopted and integrated by services or projects run by other institutions or organisations.

SUNCAT: exploring open metadata

This study will seek to determine what must be done to extend access to the catalogue, including holdings' information.

Using OpenURL Activity Data

This work will take forward the recommendations of the Shared OpenURL Data Infrastructure Investigation to further explore the value and viability of releasing OpenURL activity data for use by third parties as a means of supporting development of innovative functionality that serves the UK HE community.

Multimedia Projects

Scoping Study: Aggregations of Metadata for Images and Time Based Media

This study fed into the Resource Discovery Programme, established by JISC and RLUK, in understanding the issues, barriers and opportunities that established an aggregation of metadata describing images and time based media.

Tobar an Dualchais

This commissioned work involved the digitisation of thousands of hours of archive recordings from BBC Scotland, the National Trust for Scotland and the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. EDINA developed and hosts the Tobar an Dualchais website.

VSM Portal

A scoping study and demonstrator project to build a demonstrator portal for time-based media and still images - including those licensed for the JISC community, those available 'free' on the internet, and those generated within the academic and publicly-funded community.

Continuing Access and Digital Preservation Projects

PECAN - Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of Access via NESLi2 - Phase 2

Following on from Phase 1 of PECAN, the first step towards developing a potential service for use by HEIs and publishers alike will be taken by implementing the registry software needed to store, manage and access the entitlement information in a prototype.

PEPRS - Piloting An E-Journals Preservation Registry Service

Work in collaboration with ISSN International Centre to pilot to scope, build and test a pilot e-journals preservation registry service (PEPRS) that will provide users with information about which electronic journals have arrangements in place for digital preservation so that journal articles can be accessed over the long term.

Infrastructure Projects

EDINA technical support for the UK Federation

EDINA is providing technical support for the operation of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research.

SDSS Expert Group in Identity Management

Provides advice and guidance to the JISC on identity and access management

Web Services Tiered Internet Authorisation (WSTIERIA)

Aims to enable interoperation of web services with the by taking two current developments (Internet2 in extending Shibboleth and EDINA in developing non-browser access to federated web services) and applying them to one or more real use cases.

Data Library Projects

RADAR: Researching a Data Asset Registry

The aim is to carry out the planning and technical work needed to scope a data asset registry as anticipated in the LAIRD project (2009-2010), liaise with academic and support staff to explore ways to populate an official University data asset registry, and to work with the EDINA Linked Data Focus project to build a demonstrator based on Linked Open Data principles.

Research Data MANTRA

The development of online learning materials which reflect best practice in research data management grounded in three disciplinary contexts: social science, clinical psychology, and geoscience.

Website support for AQMeN: Applied Quantitative Methods Network

Bringing together existing methodological expertise and boost capacity in quantitative methods through a programme of training, knowledge exchange and continuing professional development, to enhance the skills of a range of social scientists who have an interest in developing, enhancing or refreshing their quantitative skills.