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Vol 5.2: Summer 2000 |
In Newsline 5.2
New EDINA Bibliographic Services |
Margarete Tubby and Andrew Bevan, EDINA
EDINA is expanding its coverage in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences with the addition of six new bibliographic services and a new periodicals directory.
Three of the new bibliographic services and the periodicals directory use the popular Ovid interface:
EconLit indexes and abstracts more than 550 international economic journals, covering accounting, consumer economics, monetary policy, labour, marketing, demographics, and more. Years of coverage are 1969 to present.
PAIS International is a bibliographic index with abstracts covering political, social, and public policy issues. Topics covered include economic, political, and social issues, business, and any topics that are or might become the subject of legislation. Years of coverage are 1972 to present.
The MLA International Bibliography indexes critical scholarship on literature, language, linguistics and folklore. Years of coverage are 1963 to present.
Ulrich's™ International Periodicals Directory is a continuously updated source of information on selected periodicals and serials published throughout the world. It includes annuals, continuations and conference proceedings, from over 80,000 serials publishers (including some 47,000 discontinued titles from 1974 onward), and full buying and ordering information.
A further three key resources in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will be offered through our continued partnership with Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. EDINA are currently offering free institutional trials for the following:
Sociological Abstracts is a primary resource for the latest research in sociology and related disciplines. The database draws information from an international selection of over 2,600 journals and other serials publications, plus conference papers, books, and dissertations. Coverage goes back as far as 1963; records added after 1974 contain abstracts of journal articles.
Social Services Abstracts provides bibliographic coverage, from 1980 onwards, of current research focused on social work, human services, and related areas, including social welfare, social policy, community development, crisis intervention, gerontology, planning, forecasting, poverty and homelessness.
Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts covers all aspects of the study of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Coverage is also given to various fields of linguistics including descriptive, historical, comparative, theoretical and geographical linguistics.
The agreements for all of the above services will be valid until 31 July 2002 in the first instance.
Site licences for the new Ovid services (EconLit, MLA, PAIS and Ulrich's) are available at special rates to UK tertiary education institutions. Additional savings over the total individual prices are available if you subscribe to the full set of all four new EDINA/Ovid services.
EDINA has also been developing links to holdings and full-text from bibliographic databases. (See the article on EDINA Links.)
As with most EDINA services, access to the new services will be via personal or shared Athens accounts. For full pricing information and to request a free 30-day institutional trial, visit the EDINA web site or email edina@ed.ac.uk.
Hugh Buchanan, EDINA
Since its launch on 10 January 2000, Digimap has quickly become an established part of the EDINA portfolio, currently supporting users from 43 institutions.
Digimap, a web-based mapping service giving access to Ordnance Survey mapping of Great Britain, has been used to create 62,000 maps for on-screen viewing in the first four months of the service. While most users will have simply viewed a map or printed a GIF image, some 3,000 high quality eps print files have been requested.
Digimap Download has been used intensively by specialists who need to process the map data on their own software. Around 10,000 tiles of map data have been downloaded in this way.
This is only the beginning. Uptake within institutions varies widely as the local support infrastructure takes time to put into place. Support staff are encouraged to use the Digimap-support email list. Prospective subscribers are invited to come to our training courses.
In the following article you can read about pilot projects to make further spatial datasets available through Digimap.
Barbara Morris, EDINA
Digimap.Plus, the R&D arm of EDINA Digimap, is testing out ways to deliver more data: Changing Landscapes will deliver Ordnance Survey historical mapping (of Newcastle and Edinburgh). Cities Revealed will allow staff and students to view, print, and download aerial photographs (of Glasgow, Newcastle, and Reading initially) for use within a gis, word processing, or mapping tool.
Many academic users are interested in the 'changing landscape'. They need easy access to data with an historical as well as a geographical dimension. To this end, the Historical County Series maps from Ordnance Survey have been scanned by the Landmark Information Group. The maps are based on the Cassini Projection and range in scale from 1:2,500 (or 25 inches to one mile) to 1:10,560 (or six inches to one mile). The maps were originally published at 1:10,560 and show the housing and railway developments which took place in eastern Edinburgh between 1909 and 1931. Using the sample data available in the pilot service, it will be possible to study developments across five different epochs, 1843-1893, 1891-1912, 1904-1939, 1919-1943, and from 1945 onwards. As part of the Changing Landscapes research, Digimap.Plus will also investigate how to manage different editions of os digital map data supplied to the national service.
Cities Revealed is modern, full colour, aerial photography covering major GB cities, provided by the Geoinformation Group in TIFF format, at a resolution of 300 dots per inch. The photoscale is 1:7,000-1:18,000. Its 25cm resolution means that trees, roads, buildings, development sites and individual cars - sometimes even their makes - can be recognised.
Pilot services are planned to start in September 2000 in six UK universities, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Oxford, and Reading, the same six institutions involved in the original Digimap trial between 1997 and 1999. We would like, eventually, to open up the Changing Landscape facility to all EDINA Digimap subscribing institutions and to increase the range of data available. This new service will complement other EDINA geo-data services, which deliver Digimap, uk Agricultural and Horticultural Census data, and boundary data (UKBORDERS™).
If you have a project which can use the historical or aerial photography data, and you are located in any of the six universities mentioned above, please let us know.
John Murison, EDINA
EDINA is on course to release a new version of its interface to Art Abstracts and Art Index Retrospective.
Based on upgraded OCLC SiteSearch software, the new interface introduces several new features and improvements:
The new version should be available at the start of August, in time for the new academic year. The current service version will not be withdrawn, however, until the end of 2000.
Following a canvass of site representatives and other interested parties in the community, EDINA is to extend the online provision of the Palmer's Index to The Times service, and to introduce a web interface. This is to be funded by a small annual service charge.
The current Telnet service will be withdrawn at the start of August, when the new Web service starts. (However, a field-test of the Web service is taking place during July - see below.)
Palmer's - the index to articles in The Times newspaper between 1790 and 1905 - has been a feature of the EDINA Telnet gateway since 1996 and a valuable research aid for academic researchers of the 19th century. The current Chadwyck-Healey JISC/Eduserv Chest agreement - which provided access to PCI, Palmer's Index (and English Poetry) - has now expired; see the article on PCI below. A field-test, shortly followed by institutional trial access, has now started; contact edina@ed.ac.uk if you wish to be involved. Access to the web service will be via Athens shared (access) or personal accounts.
The EDINA PCI service has now been withdrawn.
The five year agreement for PCI expired at the end of March 2000. To avoid disruption during the academic year, EDINA, through agreement with Chadwyck-Healey and the JISC, were able to provide the service at no extra charge to subscribing institutions until 30 June.
Chadwyck-Healey will be offering its PCI Full Text service, which combines bibliographic citations with full-text access to historical journals for the arts and humanities. This is a one-year agreement only, and the tiered subscription price is subsidised by the JISC in order to help sites transfer from the heavily-subsidised PCI service.
John Murison
EDINA Links is a new facility which adds value to EDINA bibliographic web services. When a record has been retrieved by carrying out a standard search operation, a link will be provided from the web page displaying the record to web resources of relevance to the record.
The resources can include local holdings information, or even the full text of the article to which the record refers. The facility can be customised for each institution using EDINA services, so that, for example, EDINA Links can give you access to your own university library's OPAC to determine whether it holds a copy of the journal containing the original article.
We are currently working to add EDINA Links to most of our bibliographic web services: at present, EDINA BIOSIS-Web and the Ovid services which we offer – Inspec, CAB Abstracts, EconLit, PAIS International, MLA International Bibliography and Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory – +are enabled to use the facility, although it must first be switched on for your own institution before you can use it.
We intend to launch version 1 of EDINA Links in August 2000; in the meantime, if you would like to try out the facility please ask an EDINA Site Representative at your institution to contact us by email at edina@ed.ac.uk
Exhibitions
ALLC / ACH 2000
EDINA has an exhibition stand at ALLC / ACH 2000 - the Joint International Conference of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing and the Association for Computers and the Humanities, taking place at the University of Glasgow 21-25 July 2000. http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/allcach2k/
DRH
EDINA will also have an exhibition stand at DRH2000, the Digital Resources for the Humanities conference this year at the University of Sheffield, 10-13 September 2000.
Workshops
Digimap
The current cycle of training workshops finishes in July; a further cycle will take place in September.
Art Abstracts
There are now dates for the Art Abstracts workshops in July, introducing the new interface, and in conjunction with vads: Manchester University, 21 July
London Guildhall University, 24 July
Edinburgh University, 25 July
Ei® Compendex, Inspec
Engineering faculty workshops will be held in September.
For the latest news on all EDINA training workshops, site visits and events check http://edina.ac.uk/events/
EDINA, based at Edinburgh University Data Library, is a JISC-funded national datacentre. 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.
SALSER is a completely free service, with no subscription fee. No licence or prior registration is required.
EDINA contacts
Helpdesk: Helen Kerr, Stuart Macdonald, Paula Cuccurullo and Barbara Morris,
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
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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 Autumn 2000. Editor: Paul Milne |
