October 2006: Volume 11.3
> All stories on one page
In this issue:
image©2006 Tom Armitage
Digimap will be broadening its mapping portfolio with the addition of data from the British Geological Survey in early January 2007. The geological maps will be augmented by the Lexicon of Named Rock Units, a database of information about all geological units displayed on the maps. The new service will be called Geology Digimap.
Following an agreement made between the Higher Education Funding Councils and the British Geological Survey (BGS), JISC have funded EDINA to provide through an online service some of the Digital Geological Map of Great Britain (DiGMapGB) data to the Further and Higher Education community.
The BGS data available are:
Geology Digimap will be part of the Digimap Collections; its look and feel will be familiar to existing Digimap users, and intuitive to all, regardless of their level of experience with maps. Users will be able to view maps through their web browser, save maps for printing, and download the geological map data for use in geographical information systems. Access will be through the normal Digimap Collections login page. Once your institution subscribes, just pick the Geology Digimap link from the Digimap Collections page after the login.
Geology Digimap will be available under licence from JISC; subscription fees are given on the Collections pages of the JISC web site. Note that the BGS maps and data are available under a separate licence and subscription to other Digimap Collections.
A preview service will be made available during November 2006. If you would like to be an early adopter, and take part in associated workshops and usability testing, or just need more information, please contact EDINA (edina@ed.ac.uk).
The annual update to the contemporary Ordnance Survey data took place on Thursday 31 August. The update dates of the new data are within the Digimap Help pages. Note that Boundary Line data will not be updated until 2007 when the new data is supplied by Ordnance Survey.
By popular demand, Carto now contains postcode boundary data.
You can view postcode boundaries with a Land-Line or 1:10,000 Scale Raster backdrop.
Two layers are available: postcode boundaries and postcode labels. Each of these can be switched on or off independently and can be displayed at scales between 1:500 and around 1:25,000.
These scales may change depending on feedback from users and the impact of this addition on the speed of other Digimap facilities.
As part of a "re-branding" exercise, there have been some minor alterations to the names of various services and facilities.
The login page is now called the Digimap Collections login page. This is the same login page as before (see web address below).
The Collections page now hosts two collections: Digimap - Ordnance Survey Collection and Historic Digimap (formerly known as Digimap Historic). You will only be able to access both collections if your institution subscribes to both collections. A third collection, Geology Digimap, is detailed on page 1 of this edition of Newsline. More information on subscriptions is in the Access area, available from the Digimap Collections login page.
The names of the following facilities available within Digimap have also changed:
All other names of facilities remain unchanged.
Improvements have been made to the Historic Digimap collection service. Alterations to the underlying technology mean that the interface is now easier and faster to use. There is no need to wait for the screen to refresh each time you change tools. The "holes" in data coverage, most obviously Perthshire and the Isle of Man, have been filled and the additional data is now available.
Annual subscription rates for FE Colleges have been reduced, and a trial access period of three months is now available.
EDINA is currently engaged in work to replace the Land-Line® data available through Digimap with Ordnance Survey MasterMap® data.
As part of this programme of work we are looking for institutions to be "early adopters" of the MasterMap data. This will involve early access to the MasterMap Download delivery mechanism to enable MasterMap data to be rolled out across the institution to replace Land-Line data at all levels for research and teaching.
In return EDINA will ask for feedback relating to the delivery mechanism itself, and to the onward use of the MasterMap data, its ease of use and any difficulties encountered.
If you would like your institution to be an early adopter, please see:
Everything you always wanted to know about trussing a chicken, but were afraid to ask - courtesy of Jorum. Clip from resource "Chicken Preparation [SBC - X4L the Learning Bank]"
Jorum continues to build its contributor and user services. Since launch of the user service in January 2006, 239 UK Education Institutions have signed up for the user (resource discovery) service, with 1,000 users having registered. Currently on average there are approximately 700 logins per month, and to date over 1,500 downloads have been performed by the user community.
Since the contributor service launched in November 2005, 44 UK educational institutions have made a commitment to contribute and share their resources through Jorum with the wider community. Over 1,200 resources have been contributed during this period, with a further 400 to be published soon.
Jorum continues with its research and development work and has released two reports this year, one on preservation of learning materials and another on automated metadata. A further report on workflow will be released in the near future. Service development work continues on a metadata search facility (coming in mid-October) providing web site visitors with the option to discover "information" about resources in Jorum without needing to register, as well as a rich client tool for packaging resources for Jorum.
Examples of the most frequently downloaded resources include:
New drop-down menu allows field selection for more specific search results
The look-and-feel of the user interface for the Education Image Gallery (EIG) service has been refreshed for the start of the academic year 2006/2007, including improvements to the service's functionality:
The Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) team at EDINA has been a major part of a JISC initiative to introduce "federated access management" into UK higher and further education, specifically through the deployment of the technology known as Shibboleth.
A number of early-adopter projects and support projects have been funded to explore the implications of switching to this way of managing access to web-delivered services.
The move to federated access management is an essential part of JISC's work, according to JISC's Head of Development, Sarah Porter, who delivered the keynote address at the Access Management showcase event held in central London in mid-July.
Outlining why the change of approach was needed, Ms Porter suggested that federated access management offered a number of advantages, including the support of more complex and dynamic collaborations in e-research and e-learning, access to third party e-resources and the increasing adoption of such technologies internationally.
In addition, with the strategies of both the Department for Education and Skills and The Higher Education Funding Council for England emphasising the importance of links between sectors, there was the need to work with partners such as Becta (the schools IT organisation) and the National Health Service to support a co-ordinated approach to access management across all education and other sectors.
The SDSS Federation has been operational for over two years. Its development work will come to fruition with the launch on 30 November 2006 of "The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research" (the "UK Federation"), and its subsequent expansion and development.
The UK Federation will be hosted by UKERNA, on behalf of JISC and Becta, with continuing technical support from the SDSS team.
While HE and FE institutions will be able to join the UK Federation from 30 November, JISC has recommended that in order to gain experience in this new way of working, institutions should consider joining the SDSS Federation now.
SUNCAT, the Serials Union Catalogue for the UK, ran a number of workshops in September to promote its move from project phase to fully fledged service.
Relevant for library staff who regularly manage or seek serials-related information, including reference inquiry staff, serials librarians, inter-library loan staff, cataloguing staff and liaison librarians, the workshops covered:
The e-MapScholar team are looking for case studies to be used in the new Virtual Placement project.
The project provides real-life problems that can be addressed using geo-information, including data from the Digimap service. To solve these problems learners work on case studies in the context of a simulated virtual organisation. They use online resources, geo-information handling software and data provided via a web site. Learners develop work-related skills such as data handling, problem solving, time management and effective communication and presentation of information.
If you have a data set or scenario that could be used, please contact the EDINA Helpdesk.
The Virtual Placement project was initiated with funding from JISC, and a pilot case study developed: the Nant Carfan Wind Farm Visualisation Case Study. Following evaluation of this pilot, a updated version has been produced for free use within UK HE and FE. This has been developed by the universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen and with support from the Higher Education Academy for Geography, Earth and Environmental Science (GEES).
Virtual Placement Task List page.
Virtual Geo-consultancy page: a simulated virtual organisation.
Location: Netskills, University of Newcastle, Herschel Building, Small training room
Date: Thursday, November 23rd, 2006
Location: ISC Regional Support Centre, Scotland (South & West), 1 Todd Campus, West of Scotland Science Park, Acre Road, Glasgow
Date: Tuesday, December 12th, 2006
Location: University of Manchester, Manchester Computing, Oxford Road, Kilburn Building, Lascelles Williams Training Room (Room G41) (39 on map)
Date: Thursday, December 14th, 2006
Internet Librarian
16-17 October, Copthorne Tara Hotel, London
SLIC members in the further education sector conference
27 November, Glasgow
See the latest events and training information at: