Vol 4.3: Autumn 1999
In Newsline 4.3
EDINA: a Quick Reference Guide
How many subjects are enough?
Can you see us?
Brief news items
Rogues Gallery
Forthcoming Events
About EDINA
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Vol 4.3: Autumn 1999 |
In Newsline 4.3
EDINA: a Quick Reference Guide |
by Paul Milne, EDINA Webmaster
Many users of the bibliographic and geographic web services provided by EDINA often bookmark the login page of particular services, and bypass the rest of the EDINA web site. Similarly those who use the Telnet services such as BIOSIS might never have seen the EDINA web site at all!
What are these users missing?
At EDINA the services themselves are our primary product, but we do provide some valuable ancillary information for users and support staff, freely available to view and /or download from the web site.
Users will notice that on many pages on the EDINA website, there is a 'button bar' on the left that provides quick access to areas of information that one might want to access from any number of pages. (On the 'Text only' pages, these are provided as text links.)
This button bar is not only on most EDINA pages that relate to EDINA as a whole rather than to particular services, but also on the 'top level' page for each service. On the text pages, these links appear as text links at the bottom of the page.
The buttons and what they mean:
- subscribing and registering
- Information both for end users and support staff. Prices for subscribing to services, and lists of subscribing institutions for each service. Information about ATHENS authentication.
- documentation and training
- Reference guides and training presentations relating to the EDINA services. Quick Reference Guides, (plus some more extensive documentation) available for easy download. Each document is provided as HTML, pdf, and postscript documents (there is information on the documentation page that tells how you might use these). Online training materials, available in two versions of PowerPoint slides, as well as html pages. A guide on how to download and use the PowerPoint slides.
- user support
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), contact information, and links to documentation and training.
- Newsline
- Current and back issues of Newsline. Available in simple html format, or pdf versions of the printed document.
New! Search current and back issues of Newsline, or browse the new online table of contents.- contacting EDINA
- Contact info: phone, fax, email or post. Link to the EDINA staff list.
The drop-down menu at the top of each page allows the user to go directly to any of EDINA's service information or login pages. This menu features throughout the EDINA web site. (On the text pages, these appear as text links at the top of the page.)
The items below can be found in the main body of the front page. There are also the occasional special items relating to services in development (such as Digimap).
EDINA services lets you find the service you want grouped by subject matter, or by type of data.
Service status and availability gives you the latest information on when services were updated, and any scheduled downtime for the services. Note that the last date the page was updated is indicated here. You can also access this message from the login pages of some services.
What's new is a selection of the latest news about EDINA and EDINA services.
Related information services points to a list of data centres and information gateways. This can also be accessed from the services page.
About EDINA gives you a quick overview of who we are and what we are about, including our annual report. There is a link to the Edinburgh University Data Library (the umbrella organisation for EDINA), and to the Data Library personnel pages, for contact information on staff members. Check out the Robert Burns poem Address to Edinburgh that begins, 'Edina! Scotia's darling seat!'
by John MacColl, SELLIC Director, Darwin Library, University of Edinburgh, formerly editor of Ariadne
[Editor's note: this article had to be abbreviated for space considerations for the printed edition of Newsline. What follows here is the original, uncut article. All views expressed in the article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of EDINA.]
Two major new national initiatives were announced in the academic support sector of UK higher education recently.
First came the review of the computer-assisted learning initiatives funded by the Funding Councils, the Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI) and the Teaching and Learning Technology Support Network (TLTSN). This review concluded that there was a case for rationalising these initiatives within a Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN), and for ensuring that dissemination of the developed courseware occurs more effectively. Institutions were invited to bid to host 23 new Subject Centres, replacing the previous 24.
Then came JISC's announcement, late 1998, of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), a major development in the creation of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
The RDN is intended to plug the gaps in the subject-finding aid coverage achieved by the Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme's subject gateway strand, which produced services covering engineering, medicine, business, urban design, social sciences, and art and design. The RDN is creating six 'hubs' to cover the subject span of higher education:
engineering, mathematics and computing
medicine, biomedicine, veterinary medicine and agriculture
social sciences, business and law
humanities
physical sciences (forthcoming)
creative arts (forthcoming)
For example, the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), formerly an engineering subject gateway service, now forms one component of the Engineering, Mathematics and Computing hub, which also includes the University of Birmingham and Cranfield University.
Six RDN subject hubs therefore cover the same span as 23 LTSN subject centres. The former have a brief to provide quality control to net resources: the latter will concentrate upon support for computer-based courseware creation and evaluation. These two remits will overlap, and already hubs and the existing CTI Subject Centres are drawing closer together.
For example, the respective remits of OMNI (the eLib health and medicine subject gateway), and the CTI Centre for Medicine are closely related. Both initiatives are funded from the same ultimate source, through two funding streams which diverge so that JISC manages one stream on behalf of the Funding Councils, while the other is managed as a specific project by direct top-slicing.
In a climate of service rationalisation, can we defend the creation of two closely related initiatives in national academic support, fractured radically differently by subject group? Why does there need to be so many Subject Centres?
The review of the CTI and TLTSN defends the number of Subject Centres on the basis that academics identify with disciplines, that the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) operates a 'lengthy list of discrete subjects' (in fact there are 51), and that subject associations and professional bodies need to map onto the structure.
But how important is site specificity in a distributed networked environment? No subject classification - as librarians know too well - will satisfy everybody, and the creation of 23 subject clusters, while obviously closer to the QAA classification than the six hubs, is perhaps only sufficiently detailed to please no one very much.
There is a danger that disciplines may not be happy with their 'cognate' bed-fellows. For example, 'Information and Computer Sciences' is one of the proposed new Centres, which presented problems for individual sites considering a bid on the basis of strength in computer science, since librarianship and information science is relatively sparsely found as a discipline in higher education. At a more generic level, where the mapping is cruder, there is likely to be less concern. After all, a crude classification is what most HEIs apply to themselves in their school or faculty structures. EDINA, of course, has grouped its services into 'faculties' for some time now.
The RDN's pragmatic six-way classification is more sensible. The library and information community has latched on to the need for synergy between information and learning technologies more quickly than has the computer assisted learning community, which perhaps lacks the national structures which assist the development of the wider picture.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the subject centres review exercise did not go far enough. The review admitted that 'There are now too many different projects and programmes in the use of ICT, funded jointly and severally by the Funding Councils and DENI ... the absence of strong, integrated management of the different initiatives, including JISC, at Funding Council level is now seen as frustrating by the directors of project centres and by programme coordinators. They want better dialogue.'
A better approach would have been to rationalise the two programmes to create information and learning technology hubs to serve discipline clusters effectively, extending the virtue of the managed learner support economy in UK higher education, which JISC has ably demonstrated over the past several years.
by Paul Booth, Project Officer, Disability and Information Systems in Higher Education (DISinHE)
Higher education in the UK is exempt from legislation protecting the rights of disabled people to equal access to information. But pending changes to the law may remove this status, leaving many universities with potentially illegal information and courseware on their web servers. But don't panic yet: on 5 May 1999 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced the release of its Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Recommendation, a set of definitive guidelines for web developers, part of its Web Accessibility Initiative.
'It has always been difficult to know which changes are critical,' said Tim Berners-Lee, Director of W3C. 'These guidelines answer that question, and set common expectations so that providers of web sites and users can be much more strategic. The bar has been set, and technologically it is not a very high bar. Some of the items in these guidelines will be unnecessary once authoring tools do them automatically. Now it is time to see which sites can live up to this.'
The W3C have also released checklists for web designers to review web sites, delineating three different levels of priority in the guidelines:
The full checklist is available online from the W3C web site.
In addition to these W3C guidelines, accessibility validation tools are also available. These tools (for example 'Bobby' from the Centre for Applied Special Technology (CAST)) validate and rate entire web sites against many of the checkpoints and issues raised by the W3C.
For more information about Disability and Information Systems in Higher Education, please visit the DISinHE web site.
W3C material quoted here is reproduced with permission and is copyright © World Wide Web Consortium (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All Rights Reserved.
[Editor's note: the current version of EDINA was designed with accessibility guidelines in mind, and was validated using 'Bobby'. See Newsline, vol 3.1, 'Making EDINA services more accessible', http://edina.ac.uk/news/newsline3-1.html]
On Wednesday, 1 September 1999, EDINA launched its AGDEX service.
Profiled in the last issue of Newsline, AGDEX is an information service aimed towards practical agriculturalists, horticulturists, and others involved in rural businesses. The AGDEX service is based on a database of references and abstracts compiled by the Scottish Agricultural College, Edinburgh.
Whilst the majority of users will come from the UK Higher Education community, EDINA hopes also to attract users from outside higher education, including producers and distributors of agricultural products, advisory services, charitable bodies, and marketing agencies. Contact edina@ed.ac.uk for a free trial.
In view of the continued use of 'shared' ATHENS access accounts in higher education, staff at EDINA have been working over the summer to allow access from shared accounts to a variety of EDINA services.
EDINA now provides access via ATHENS access accounts to the following services: AGDEX, PCI Web, Art Abstracts, Inspec, CAB Abstracts, ESPMD, Ei Compendex®.
The functionality of these services may be reduced with ATHENS access accounts, as user information cannot then be held between sessions. Sites using EDINA services are strongly recommended to issue their end users with personal ATHENS accounts.
Since the last issue of Newsline there has been much enthusiasm surrounding EDINA Digimap. Around 60 sites have expressed an interest in the service, many of which are already committed to subscribing. Our planned launch date is 10th January 2000, and the Digimap team are working hard to meet this.
The raw OS data available in the EDINA Digimap service amounts to around 60 gigabytes. Support pages are being written and continuously updated to help institutions understand their role in supporting the end users of the EDINA Digimap service.
Under the JISC/OS agreement only 30% of the national coverage for Land-Line is available, so it has been necessary to devise a tile selection mechanism. After consultation with site representatives in July, the mechanism for selecting Land-Line tiles has been finalised and development for the tile selection software tool is continuing accordingly. (Land-Line is large-scale map data, at the scale of individual houses.)
Training for site representatives will take place on 1-3 and 15-17 November at Netskills in Newcastle, and 22-23 November and 2-3 December in Edinburgh. The course will be modularised so there will be no need for attendance on consecutive days. Further details will be sent to interested institutions in due course.
If your institution has not yet expressed an interest in Digimap and would like to subscribe, please contact edina@ed.ac.uk as soon as possible. As ever, please keep an eye on our web site for further updates: http://edina.ac.uk/digimap
We at Newsline want to know what you think of us!
We have inserted a Readers' Survey into a limited number of copies of this edition of Newsline. If you are one of the lucky few, please take the time to fill in the brief survey and return it to us. We aim to re-design Newsline for the millennium, looking at both the kind of content provided, and the overall design. The answers you provide will help us to make Newsline more useful and attractive.
For the insatiably curious, here are photos and brief notes on the new staff mentioned in the last edition of Newsline.
Digimap poster session at DRH conference at King's College London, 13th-15th September
EDINA, based at Edinburgh University Data Library, is a JISC-funded national data centre. It offers the UK further and higher education and research community networked access to a library of data, information and research resources. All EDINA services are free of charge at the point of use. For information on institutional subscription fees, visit the EDINA web site, or contact us by email (details below).
EDINA services are:
EDINA subscription and registration
Most EDINA services require the completion of a licence agreement before those services can be made available to users. Free 30-day trials are available for most of these services. Please see the EDINA web site for details of the requirements of individual services.
For UKBORDERS™, there is no fee for academic institutions within the UK, but a licence agreement must be signed (email edina@ed.ac.uk), and individual users must sign an End User Licence.
For Ordnance Survey Strategi, each institution is required to hold a current and valid Ordnance Survey Educational Copyright Licence in addition to a subscription to EDINA. Contact EDINA in the first instance (email edina@ed.ac.uk).
SALSER is a completely free service, with no subscription fee. No licence or prior registration is required.
EDINA contacts
Helen Kerr, Claudia Gröpl and Stuart Macdonald (Helpdesk)
Alison Bayley (Manager, EDINA National Services)
Peter Burnhill (Director of EDINA)
Tel: 0131 650 3302
Fax: 0131 650 3308
Email: edina@ed.ac.uk
URL: http://edina.ac.uk
Reference cards
Reference cards for most EDINA services are available for purchase at £12/100. They are also available free from the EDINA Web pages in PDF and PostScript formats.
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EDINA Newsline is published four times a year by the University of Edinburgh Data Library. Suggestions and comments on Newsline may be sent to edina@ed.ac.uk. The next issue of Newsline will appear in Winter 1999. Editor: Paul Milne |