by Rick Loup, EDINA
EDINA is to launch a new service, the Education Image Gallery, using content licensed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the world-famous Getty Images® archive.
Users at subscribing institutions in further and higher education will have access to an exciting collection of 50,000 images for use in learning, teaching and research. An initial 40,000 images will be available at the time of launch; the remaining 10,000 images will be selected in response to user feedback. Drawing on the vast resources of Hulton Archive, Photodisc and the Getty Images News Service (current events and sport), the service will offer approximately 3,000 images per decade from the late 19th century through the whole of the 20th century to the present-day.
Selected by leading academics, the images cover key subject areas across the curriculum including history, entertainment, sport, science, fashion, politics, music, conflict, film, art, leisure and women's studies.
The Education Image Gallery will be available for institutional subscription on 5 January 2004; one-month free trials will be available from 1 December 2003. To obtain a free trial, to subscribe, or to find out about subscription rates, go to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/coll_hultongetty.html. Enquiries about the Education Image Gallery should be addressed to the EDINA Helpdesk, edina@ed.ac.uk, or tel: 0131-650 3302, or see the service web pages at http://edina.ac.uk/eig.
by Morag Macgregor, EDINA
An updated version of EDINA BIOSIS was brought into service for the new academic year.
Improvements include a more streamlined interface and improved functionality. In addition, EDINA BIOSIS is the first service to provide access to the new format BIOSIS data, supplied to us in XML format from July this year. The content of the BIOSIS back file (1969-2002) has also been enhanced and standardised.
Full text and holdings linking is an important feature of bibliographic data services. As an OpenURL aware service, EDINA BIOSIS supports links to OpenURL resolvers such as SFX. To replace the EDINA Links feature, EDINA provide the OpenURL resolver Balsa, a linking service which can be set up on request and customised for your institution. For more information on this see http://edina.ac.uk/support/openurl.shtml. (See also the article on OpenURL in this edition of Newsline.)
The Help pages and other support documentation have been updated to reflect the changes to EDINA BIOSIS, and the new Quick Reference Guides are being sent out to BIOSIS site representatives with this newsletter.
We hope users find the modifications an improvement. We plan to conduct an interface review during the 2003/04 academic session and we will contact site representatives at the appropriate time. If you have any immediate comments or views, please contact our Helpdesk (edina@ed.ac.uk).
by Rick Loup, EDINA
All ten collections of films and video originally commissioned for Education Media OnLine, the JISC-funded moving image download service, are now represented within the service.
The latest addition is the IWF Knowledge and Media GmbH collection, which covers bio-medical science and the life sciences, zoology, botany, anthropology, chemistry, environmental science, genetics, oceanography, chemistry, physics, physical sciences, mathematics, ethnography and geology.
Over the next two to three years some 75 hours of IWF titles will become available through Education Media OnLine. These initial short highlight extracts are complete in themselves, each showing a single scientific process or phenomenon.
Based in Germany, IWF Knowledge and Media GmbH is one of the worlds leading science film institutes. It has been working since the late 1940s on behalf of academic researchers to create audiovisual recordings of physical phenomena in nature and technology, the biological sciences, and ethnographic customs and processes in culture and society.
Free Service Continues: JISC have confirmed that will be no institutional subscription charge for Education Media OnLine until at least 31 July 2005, the full term of the current sub-licence.
For further details of Education Media OnLine and the IWF Knowledge and Media GmbH collection, and to find out how to subscribe to the service, go to http://www.emol.ac.uk.
by Christine Rees and Sandy Shaw, EDINA
The Technologies for Information Security Project (TIES - see Newsline 7.4), has demonstrated practical deployment of digital certificates within an HE institution and their use for authenticating users to web-based services, held by a data service provider in the JISC Information Environment (IE). This has involved the implementation and testing of a functional Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) as a demonstration of proof of concept.
Led by EDINA and funded for one year by the JISC within the Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting (AAA) Programme, TIES considered the problem of authentication in the UK academic environment through investigation of the technical, managerial, and practical issues in the deployment of X.509 digital certificates within a PKI model for the UK academic community.
In addition to providing access management for the licensed resources of the JISC IE, the other major application areas of local institutional services and e-Science Grid were also considered.
Although the focus of the project has been authentication, some specific authorisation technologies including Shibboleth (http://shibboleth.internet2.edu) have been implemented to prove the integration of PKI authentication with a range of authorisation methods.
A report has now been submitted to JISC summarising the investigations and outlining the PKI design options felt to be most effective for use in UK HE and FE, with recommendations on how activity in this area might be progressed.
Further details of the project and the final report are at http://edina.ac.uk/projects/ties/.
The Serials Union Catalogue (SUNCAT) Project (see Newsline 7.4) is progressing apace.
We are deploying a team with considerable and broad expertise in cataloguing, standards and database development. The SUNCAT Bibliographic Quality Advisory Group, including heads of serials and cataloguing from our associate partner organisations (the National Library of Scotland and the University Libraries of Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Oxford), is addressing the substantial bibliographic challenges raised by the project.
Over the last eight months we have critically appraised various abstract and implementation models for SUNCAT. We have also worked with our partner (ExLibris, http://www.exlibris-usa.com) and associate partners to develop procedures for contributing records, converting them into MARC21 format and testing an initial match and merge algorithm. Loading is well under way.
The first eight months has been a period of rich learning for the project team. The serials world faces many new challenges, and so must we. We have uncovered a range of issues associated with building a union catalogue from extremely heterogeneous data of variable quality:
Current information about SUNCAT developments is on the project web site: http://www.suncat.ac.uk.
by Tim Stickland, EDINA
OpenURL is a mechanism for linking between different bibliographic services, conveying metadata describing items such as journal articles and books.The most common application is to link between an abstracting and indexing database (a referrer) and services (resolvers) which locate copies relating to the reference that a user has found in his search. This type of OpenURL resolver is sometimes called a link server, and provides links to library catalogues, full text services, etc.
An OpenURL resolver service is only useful to an institution when the bibliographic services to which it subscribes act as referrers. This requires the service provider (such as EDINA) to insert a link to the resolver within their user interface, generally alongside each record in a set of search results. This makes the service OpenURL aware.
EDINA is making all of its bibliographic services OpenURL aware. If you wish your EDINA services to link to your institutions OpenURL resolver, please contact our Helpdesk.
Use of OpenURL does simplify links between reference and access to full text. However, as increasing numbers of services become OpenURL aware, and institutions with resolvers give details of their resolver to the providers of their services, configuration and maintenance is multiplied across every service and subscriber. This is particularly problematical for free access services, which have no business relationship with end users institutions, and so no conduit for exchanging details of OpenURL resolvers.
To make life easier, EDINA and UKOLN have begun the OpenURL Router initiative, to provide a central registry for OpenURL resolver information for all HE/FE institutions, to be in service in January 2004.
Institutions that acquire an OpenURL resolver will then be able to register the details with the Router; OpenURL aware services can then use the Router to link to the appropriate resolver for each end user.
For subscription services, this will simplify the set-up procedure, and enable free access services to link to the appropriate resolver for a user, even where the service providers and the users institution are unaware of each other; the service provider simply has to provide a link to the OpenURL Router, which will transparently redirect the user to their resolver.
For more info, see http://edina.ac.uk/support/openurl.shtml.
by Emma Beer, AHDS
The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), one of the several JISC services with which EDINA works closely, is currently undergoing change. This involves a renaming process, and a new integrated AHDS web site.
The five subject-based Centres of the AHDS are now named as below and have the following URLs:
The general URL for the AHDS remains the same at http://ahds.ac.uk
A new cross-search catalogue is being developed which allows users to search across all five of the AHDS Centres collections. This development will be particularly beneficial to researchers seeking perspectives from a range of disciplines. For instance, a simple search on Shakespeare will point you to text collections from AHDS Literature, Languages, and Linguistics, images from AHDS Performing Arts collections, including photographs and data from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust which is held by AHDS History.
At this early stage in the development of the cross-search catalogue, your feedback is welcomed via the online feedback form.
The JIBS User Group has the principal aim of stimulating and maintaining interest in online services of interest to HE and FE either via the JISC and the IE, or from other independent sources. EDINA has worked closely with JIBS over the years.
JIBS holds regular open meetings to discuss issues of relevance to the academic community. These are announced on email lists, including lis-jibs-users, and on their web site http://www.jibs.ac.uk. EDINA has participated in several recent meetings including the successful OpenURL event in September and looks forward to continued involvement in the future.
We will say more about the work of the JIBS User Group in the next issue of Newsline.
EDINA will be exhibiting at:
Online Information
2-4 December 2003
Olympia Grand Hall, London.
Conference and exhibition for those who use, manage or source information for business or research. Watch for EDINA's exhibition stand.
http://www.online-information.co.uk/
GridGIS
15-16 December 2003
Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge
An event to bring together representatives from the e-science and the Geographic Information Science communities.
http://www.niees.ac.uk/
MasterMAP Workshop
Tuesday 16 December 2003 1.30 - 5pm
Cambridge e-Science Centre, Wilberforce Road, Cambridge
For those with an interest in the new OS MasterMAP dataset and the provision of OS data to the academic community. Workshop is free. Further details will be available shortly on the events page.
EDINA, based at Edinburgh University Data Library, is a JISC-funded national datacentre. It offers the UK tertiary 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.
EDINA services are:
Helpdesk: Helen McVey, Paula Cuccurullo, Kirsten Thomlinson and Andrew Bevan
Helen Chisholm (EDINA User Support Manager)
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
Many 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.
Other services are free of charge, with or without a licence agreement.
Please see the EDINA web site for details of the requirements of individual services: http://edina.ac.uk/access/subscribe.shtml
EDINA Newsline is published four times a year by the Edinburgh University Data Library. Suggestions and comments on Newsline may be sent to edina@ed.ac.uk.
The next issue of Newsline will appear in Spring 2004.
Editor: Paul Milne
