EDINA newsline
June 2007: Volume 12 Issue 2
Our move to new offices brought home that, as far as you are concerned, we live on the Internet. With unchanged email addresses, URLs, and phone numbers, you may have hardly noticed: Helpdesk and online services, delivered 24/7 from remote computers, were uninterrupted.
We are now in the midst of the redesign of our other home, the EDINA website on that other place, the cyberspace of the Internet. There the talk is of the significance of social networking, and one of the things we are going to try to do is turn up where you are, to get out more, virtually as well as in person, and provide new forms of common services.
To date, our principal business has been online delivery of reliable, user-friendly access to commercially-licensed content, responding to the agenda, and funding, set by JISC and the UK research councils. Build it and they shall come. It worked; they did, and still do. Digimap, UKBORDERS, Film & Sound Online, and EIG are among the current examples. Recently, we have been observing two shifts in our activity.
First, there is demand for facilities for ‘community-contributed’ content, either ‘open’ (meaning access to all globally) or ‘value-added’ work, that builds on and extends that commercially-licensed content. The launch of the Depot (see below) is a very recent example, but so is SUNCAT, with its contributions from participating libraries, and, for learning materials, the Jorum, a joint activity with MIMAS. GRADE and now DataShare are examples of the project activity that represent the second shift in our activity for EDINA, with their mix of attention on licensed and ‘open data’.
EDINA features on the international stage both as example of an innovative national online service provider and also as focus for Internet engineering, engaging in common concerns and technologies; the OpenURL Router and GeoCrossWalk are classic examples of what is now best done ‘at the network level’ as part of what is also called the e-infrastructure, needed also for the eScience GRID. Essential to online service delivery, by us and others supporting the UK academic community, is the UK Access Management Federation, a JISC initiative managed by UKERNA but built upon the work of EDINA SDSS pilot federation, an application of international effort, this time Shibboleth/SAML. Think globally and act locally. Well, we do, trying to make sense of what is happening globally and having to deliver in ways that make sense locally – to the variety of perspective of individual universities and colleges across the UK that use our services – via institutional and library portals, VLEs and other jumping-off places.
However, researchers both think and act globally; the invisible college of the discipline is international, as well as and perhaps more than national, and students are everywhere. In turn, we ‘deliver globally’, needing to project ourselves as more than just one more set of URLs on the Internet. Just as success of EDINA over the past 12 years as a JISC NDC coincided with understanding the significance of the infant Web, so the basis of the next phase of success depends upon understanding the next generation, both the adolescent Web 2.0 and the Internet habits of the young. First time around, staff and student went online predominantly for academic reasons. Not so now. Those students, and many younger staff, did not learn about the Internet and email by being at Uni.
Let’s be plain: we are looking to learn, from colleagues nationally and internationally, young and old. So, we seek your thoughts on how to turn Internet developments into advantage for UK scholarship. Please contact us via the EDINA Helpdesk, still, as you know, to be found at the same address - although looking to network socially.