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Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA, Opens the day with the history of the service

The first job is to welcome you all to say we’ve come here to celebrate EDINA Digimap’s 10th Anniversary. The launch of EDINA Digimap as a JISC supported national online service, providing access to Ordnance Survey mapping data. So on behalf of the University of Edinburgh and of all of the staff of EDINA, can I say how pleased and honoured we are to have you all come here, especially those who have travelled from afar. So a big thank and welcome also to those who have agreed to speak, those of you who bring gold, those who bring data, and those who bring their customer regularly. I was going to try some horrible pun about gold franken-data and meta-manure, but I decided against it.

Anyway, launched in January 2000, Digimap is world class and was first in terms of an internet mapping delivery of a national mapping agency. We soon had the benefit of Laserscan’s pioneer software and the able skills of many of our staff, including Tim Urwin, I’ll just give you a quick name check, who made the data, which came in looking horrible, into stuff which even the hardcore, printed map librarian could tolerate as a facsimile of what may be regarded as a proper map. And that tradition that we had was important at the start and important all the way through. It won the AGI technology award, and it has changed for the better the way in which research, learning, and teaching is done.

That said, my purpose today is not to explain how Digimap has succeeded as a service - that’s for others to say and do - I’ve got another purpose in mind which I will disclose later, but I would like to note that term Digimap has transformed itself from a single noun into a collective noun. Digimap is now a collection and a delivery platform for what it acknowledges the core geography of this land, or even of these islands. Of land and settlement - now and back into the past, of its coast and its waterways, and of its underlying geology. And there will be talk today, no doubt, of a UK academic spatial data infrastructure, and as we all know, that is a good thing – and we want one. So among our speakers are senior executives of the JISC, and of the manufacturers of those data – the geographic data – without whom none of this would have possible. But we also have representatives for the users of Digimap, without whom none of this would have been sensible. And not forgetting representatives of our staff, who as ever will try and answer any question – whether sensible or not. We’ll also not forget that we have a guest to our table this evening – Mike Parker, who will be our after dinner speaker. However, I am particularly grateful for Vanessa Redgrave…uh…Redgrave! LAWRENCE! Deary me, I am very grateful to her too actually, for something I won’t tell you about *laughs*. Vanessa Lawrence, for having agreed to be our keynote speaker this afternoon, which will come to be known as the after-cake speaker – or as we say in Edinburgh, you’ll have had your tea. These occasions are opportunities to reflect on achievement over the past ten years, and we look forward to the interesting times into which we now project ourselves, and I am grateful for all of our speakers for taking up that challenge.

No mention of Digimap and its achievements over the past ten years could be made without mentioning other absent friends. First and foremost, I should mention David Medyckyj-Scott, who first joined EDINA almost exactly 13 years ago today, when Digimap was the name of a project, not a service. We said our goodbyes to David last month, and I will repeat now what I said to him in person – that David made a difference. The difference between what was always going to be a good project, and what become a world class project and then a world class service that we are celebrating today. Of course he was adamant to stress that he didn’t do this by himself – that that achievement is due to the many first rate colleagues that he has had, and that I have had, across all of EDINA – from user support to infrastructure, and from software engineers to GI specialists. I still have the first e-mail from David dated June 1996 and sent from Landcare cri.nz, the organization to which he has now returned. We had known each other since the ESRC regional research laboratory initiative, and he wanted to come back to the UK. He was enquiring about the outcome of the project officer post which we had advertised for the Digimap project.

And here I disclose my hidden purpose, which is to sketch a brief prehistory of Digimap, based upon an archaeological dig into my archive of email messages. The first message in my Digimap email folder is dated a little earlier - in January 1996. It is from Dave Cook of JISC – or what was then known as ISSC of the computer board -informing us that the wonderfully named FIGIT had agreed to fund the Digimap project, but only on condition that we clarified what would happen if the ISSC could not strike a license deal with the Ordnance Survey. Thus began Digimap as an eLib project – under the electronic libraries program run by Chris Rusbridge – I am very pleased to see you are here today Chris. However, the earliest e-mail message I could find about Ordnance Survey data was sent to me nine years earlier on 28th of March 1987. Now, as co-director of RL Scotland and manager of the data library, we were doing things with geo data, but I had been asked by the coordinator of the RL initiative to investigate data needs for the other four RRLs that had been set up, and OS mapping was high on the list. The email was sent from a co-director of an RRL, the significance of this email other than its age is its content, as the message was about the deadlock that there was on the access to OS mapping data. But maybe the real significance of the email was that it was from a David Rhind. A professor of geography at Birkbeck college, and he was later to go on from poacher to game keeper to become director general of the Ordnance Survey during a critical period in the prehistory and then the project phase of Digimap. Well I have these emails and I intend to put them into an online appendix to this talk. I am still wondering whether I need anybody’s permission, but maybe that’s for another day and I’m sure you’ll come see me in jail sometime. However, I would like to share some of the delights of that email – so fast forward from 1987 and the next email found is dated 12th of September 1994, when a former map librarian at the University of Edinburgh – David Ferro- and it was in reference to this Follett in the subject line to a funding call for projects, and it was Follett that put the f in fidget by the way. And David Ferro was keen that the University librarian – Brenda Moon, and the director of computing – Richard Field backed a bid, to quote: “Find a University solution to the problems posed by the development of Ordnance Survey digital mapping”. Well for the GI experts, Ordnance Survey digital mapping was exciting and necessary. But for mere mortals, and especially for map librarians, they were a problem and needed a solution. So the data library - and those were the days before EDINA- was a can-do group as far as the librarian was concerned, and we knew about boundaries and addressed based geography, particularly as they related to small area statistics and we just launched UKBORDERS. So an expression for FIGIT went in – an expression of interest for FIGIT went in – and a copy had been sent to our contact at Ordnance Survey. So the email dated 4th of October 1994 from Neil Smith – sent just after midnight I should point out, so they were still working very hard even then – was the first email comment I can find from the OS, albeit a very informal style- he says: “I read through your submission with interest. I passed it to Jim Page as well as Steve Hartley, who handles the business and professional markets for data, including most of our large scale databases. At this stage I can give some unresearched and personal comments on your submission”, he then goes on to list a rather large number of factual errors that we had made about OS products, but he then concludes – “The points that are going to raise most concern here is how the release of data is controlled. Is the data in some way to be sent out as noncopyable or read only once? Or is it to be networked so that the user never actually receives a copy of the data? The present climate is such that the agreements may not be regarded as watertight. I personally support what you are trying to do, and will try and generate further support here”. So the idea of providing online service for university had hit home. The expression of interest, submitted to FIGIT, was found interesting but not sufficiently compelling, and our proposal was put to one side.

We then continued with our efforts to secure OS data for Scotland’s universities. And a seminar organised to assess how that could be done attracted attention across the UK but also across the sector, and the National Library Scotland and particularly Chris Fleet, applied to attend this, and asked whether a certain Fred Guy could also come along. Some of you will know that Fred Guy now works for EDINA with SUNCAT. So this led to a presentation later on for the eLib group in December 1995, which must have gone rather well because it led to an invitation from Alice Colban on 12 noon on the 22nd of December, and how often is it so close to that period when everyone goes away, saying: “Thank you for presenting your ideas for an images project to the representatives of FIGIT on Tuesday 19th of December. Members were very interested in your proposed project and saw it as a useful awareness raising activity for the community. It was suggested that you should link the service more to the possible outcome of the OS deal, and give details of the size of consortium type and specialist and generalised collections. We would like a full proposal by 16th of January *laughs* at the very latest, with a cash limit of 200k over 2 years. Should funding be approved for the project, it will have no bearing on decisions regarding which data centre will host the OS data if negotiations are successful”– so Manchester you are always in with a shout *laughs*.

That eventually led to an email from Dave Cook on the 30th of January 1996 that I referred to. He gave us an amber light because we had to clarify what would happen if the ISSC could not actually strike that deal with Ordnance Survey. So we answered the Digimap has some other options for data, that the university had bought some strategy data, that there was some OS data from the test sites, and that we anticipated that the test sites might be wanting additional data and maybe we could swing the idea that that would be provided for all universities. Well we finally got authority to place two job adverts in April, and just finally got back to us in June to say that they were happy with our milestones. So here’s an email I sent to Dave in 1996: “I’m off tomorrow for a map curators group and I’ll send you a draft. We’ve been employing a computer science student – Ciaran Wills – who has written the first cut user interface for the OS map data held in ArcINFO and Ingres using Java. This allows the map libraries to access data across JANET using web browsers. We’ve also just appointed one or two project officers for a one year period starting 23rd of April – Barbara Morris – her job is liaison with the map librarians”, and I’m sorry that Barbara can’t be here today, she is unwell at the present, “and to date the GIS input has been coming from Alistair Towers who is mostly UKBORDERS”. I followed that with an e-mail to our project associates, which were at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Oxford and Reading, indicating that we had to put in place regulations for site reps and end users so that the OS can see how careful we are being. In the short run I will give you the status of field testers. In brief: you agree to be an extension for the Edinburgh projects and I take responsibility for your actions. I mean, you had to put ourselves on the line. When David Medyckyj-Scott took up post in January 1997 and the University of Glasgow became an associate Digimap site, and in February 1998 we learnt by email the news that Professor David Rhind was to step down form the OS and become Vice Chancellor of the City University, we were unsure of the significance of that decision he made because we were getting no where on the negotiations at the time, except the next appoint was Jeffery Robinson who had to oversee a new change of status for OS and that our keynote speaker – Vanessa Lawrence, came into post after Digimap had been launched, so it would be intriguing to peer into the email archive of Ordnance Survey to find out what was going on and who was saying no and might say yes. I leave that as an open offer.

Back in January 1998 we were deep in discussions with OS and JISC about which data products there should be. We aimed then that it should be at end users and HE support staff in libraries and computer services, aimed at a wide range of end users across all disciplines – not just GI experts – and the services will meet demand for map viewing, map production, AND, it says in caps, for data downloading. In November 1999, Claus 7.4 of the OS agreement stated that the funding bodies can terminate the agreement if less than 37 HEIs have become licensees in the first nine months of the agreement. So we weren’t quite there yet. But, at 3:36 pm EDINA support issued the followed statement by email on January 10th 2000: “We are delighted to announce that Digimap went live as a national service on 10th of January as planned. 39 universities and other HEIs have committed to the subscription, slightly more than anticipated as this stage”. Less than three hours later we received the e-mail reply: “Congratulations one and all”, from the eLib programme director Chris Rusbridge. There is more that I could relate about the 4 year period between 1996 and the launch in January 2000, which I give credit to many names and some of the people who just came in the room too. And there were many – several of which gathered here, but I will leave that to some sort of publication in the list in the email archive. But today I have only time to welcome you once more, and to have the pleasure of introducing two individuals: first Lorraine Estelle, chief executive officer of JISC collections, and Rachel Bruce, director of programmes at JISC innovation. They have believed, helped, and assisted Digimap in its grown up years ensuring that once past its toddler stage in its early noughties, Digimap has had the wear with all to develop into what it is today. They have a comparable role in deciding its future as it moves forward into its teens.

I welcome you all.