October 2004: Volume 9.3
> All stories on one page
In this issue:
by Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA
A new academic year under way, it's time to pause and reflect, having worked hard during the Summer revising, renewing, and developing our online services.
You may have already noticed the make-over of our web site, http://edina.ac.uk. The new design not only enhances usability and complies with accessibility requirements, but also provides a framework to make changes as we add services and facilities to achieve our mission as a national data centre: to enhance productivity for research, learning and teaching. See page 4 for more details of the new design.
EDINA provides staff and students with facilities for an increasingly wide range of tasks and information types: finding and securing key text, downloading still or moving images, and retrieving data or making maps.
So we are particularly pleased that the JISC and the Ordnance Survey have successfully negotiated a further five-year agreement, with positive implications for Digimap. Similarly, we are delighted with a renewal of Education Image Gallery (EIG) following a successful pilot service. And on the bibliographic front, we can announce a new three-year agreement for our Index to the Times service.
In addition to providing usable and reliable services to researchers and students, we must also help support staff present these services within the context of their organisations. We therefore have developed an array of supplementary material which can be downloaded and re-packaged to support services for use in the local settings of university, college and research institute, whether through the library portal or VLE.
Other types of support services are in development in project activity, such as the JORUM online repository for learning objects, and SUNCAT, the national union catalogue of serials. Reports on JORUM and SUNCAT can be found in this edition of Newsline.
EDINA is also a contributing partner to the newly created Digital Curation Centre (featured in Newsline 9.1.). The DCC aims to improve quality of the processes, technical and organisational, geared to ensuring longevity of digital works, by supporting a new profession of 'digital curators'.
EDINA continues to work with very many others in developing 'shared services' for the UK digital library, such as the national OpenURL router, GetRef & GetCopy, Go-Geo and geoXwalk, facilities that work 'behind the scenes' in institutional and specialist portals. We are investigating how best, within the context of the Common Information Environment, to support workers who are building digital libraries, learning environments and the spatial data infrastructure.
For both projects and services, interworking with partners is as important for success as interoperability is technically. So please read this edition of Newsline, and our web site, as one of those partners, and feed back your views about our performance and what should be our priorities over 2004/5 and beyond. We look forward to hearing from you, via edina@ed.ac.uk.
by Stuart Macdonald
The new EDINA agcensus subscription service was launched on 1 October to provide online access to data derived from UK Agricultural Censuses.
EDINA agcensus offers distribution maps at 2km, 5km and 10km levels of aggregation, dating from 1969 to the present. Maps and data cover England, Scotland and Wales. Data can be downloaded as ASCII files suitable for analysis and integration with other data in a GIS. Census data for the most recent year is available free of charge and can be visualised at 10km at http://agcensus.edina.ac.uk/demo/index.html. Access to the time-series data is free to members of subscribing academic institutions via the Athens authentication system. The service is also available to subscribing non-academic institutions (commercial, research, policy) and to individuals on a per-project basis.
The Agricultural Census is conducted in June each year in England, Scotland and Wales by the government departments for agriculture and rural affairs. The collated data provide information on distribution and extent of crop and horticultural production and the rearing of livestock. The Census is also a useful indicator of regional change in agricultural activity over time.
Edinburgh University Data Library has developed algorithms which define each geography (e.g. parish, in the case of Scotland) in terms of 1km squares. This framework is used in conjunction with the Land Use Framework, a sevenfold classification of the use of the same 1km grid squares. Census items are then distributed over those 1km grid squares with the land use category suitable for the census item in question.
For further information including information on cost and site licences, contact EDINA at edina@ed.ac.uk.
by Tim Riley
A preview of the new UKBORDERS Boundary Data Selector interface has been released so that users can respond with feedback before the final version goes live in November.
The Boundary Data Selector lets you select the boundaries you want, for the area you want, in the format you want. For example, you could download Census Output Areas for several counties, or for a specific ward or district. You can preview your selection over an Ordnance Survey back-drop map (from the Digimap Service) and then extract your selection from the UKBORDERS database in one of several GIS formats.
Boundary data available from the Boundary Data Selector covers a date range of 1840 to 2003, including Quality Assured replacements for all datasets available through the Original UKBORDERS Interface.
The Preview version of the Boundary Data Selector and the Original UKBORDERS interface will run in tandem for 3 months, at which point the final version of the Boundary Data Selector will be released and the original UKBORDERS interface will be withdrawn.
By Tim Riley
The JISC have published consultation documents designed to gather feedback from the HE and FE community on demand for Geological and Hydrographic maps and data. The documents explain, among other things, how the data would be delivered through EDINA Digimap and suggest prices for institutional annual subscriptions.
To read the consultation documents and provide feedback on your interest, follow these links:
Hydrographic Consultation (link no longer works)
Geological Consultation (link no longer works)
Whether or not JISC secures this data will depend largely on feedback from the community.
by Moira Massey
The JORUM procurement process for the purchase, installation, development and support of an online repository system for learning and teaching materials has now been completed. The contract has been awarded to Intrallect (http://www.intrallect.com/) for their "intraLibrary Learning-Object Management System". The contract was awarded on 24th August 2004 following a European Union procurement process that began in February 2004. Eight vendors were short-listed to tender from seventeen that submitted pre-qualification questionnaires. JISC and the two national data centres were delighted to offer the contract to Intrallect, who tendered a very strong bid and were able to demonstrate a robust and flexible standards-based repository system.
The JORUM team is looking forward to working with Intrallect to launch the JORUM service for the whole of UK higher and further education from August 2005. The JORUM service will form a key part of the JISC Information Environment, and will be the basis of a major new initiative in online learning and teaching. The JORUM service technical infrastructure, support and outreach services will be fully supported by the two national data centres, EDINA at the University of Edinburgh and MIMAS at the University of Manchester.
The set-up and launch project that will lead JORUM into service from August 2005 has now commenced. Customisation of the system to meet the user community's requirements will commence shortly, after which the migration of existing JISC project output content, collated content from other sources and content from early adopters will be submitted to the system.
by Leah Halliday
Over the last 18 months, the SUNCAT Project has been developing a National Union Catalogue of Serials for the UK research community. SUNCAT will have two primary aims: it will be a tool for locating serials in UK research libraries, and it will be a central source of high-quality bibliographic records that libraries contributing to SUNCAT may download to upgrade their local catalogues.
Phase 1 of the SUNCAT project has been a period of rich learning and substantial design and development. We now have an agreed architecture and have developed procedures for acquiring, converting and loading serials records from UK research libraries. The SUNCAT database currently contains 3.7 million records. Of these 1.7 million have been contributed by UK libraries; the ISSN Register and the CONSER Database contributed a further one million records each. These records represent a substantial proportion of titles in UK libraries, perhaps more than 90%.
During Phase 1 EDINA has also customised the Aleph out-of-the-box interface - provided by our partner ExLibris - to suit the behaviour and preferences of the UK research community.
Between now and when the service is launched in 2005, the SUNCAT Project team has much to do, particularly in the area of matching records of different quality. Many of the records contributed to SUNCAT by UK libraries refer to the same serial titles. A search result will present the user with only the best bibliographic record, attached to which will be a holdings statement from each holding library. To achieve this, the SUNCAT system must effectively match all records for the same title with one another and identify the best bibliographic record for display (this is known as the 'preferred record'). An algorithm developed for matching records in the California Digital Library catalogue Melvyl is being customised by the SUNCAT team for use with UK data so as to maximise the proportion of records that can reliably be matched whilst avoiding false matches. Throughout 2005, duplication of records will be reduced as libraries check their unmatched records.
Libraries that contribute records to SUNCAT may wish to upgrade their local catalogues. SUNCAT will provide a facility for downloading the preferred record for a title into the local catalogue using Z39.50.
In January 2005, Phase 2 of the project will begin. At the same time as delivering a pilot service, EDINA will continue to develop SUNCAT to improve its utility and to accommodate the various cataloguing practices of contributors. The pilot service will be a valuable contribution to the information resources available to UK researchers. Access to SUNCAT is via the EDINA home page.
by Tim Stickland
EDINA, in association with UKOLN, have developed the JISC-sponsored OpenURL Router to ease the administrative burden of setting up and maintaining links between bibliographic services and local OpenURL resolvers.
A vital function of the OpenURL Router is the ability to identify users and determine the institution to which they belong, so that they can be directed to the appropriate local OpenURL resolver. This capability has now been enhanced by the use of Athens Single Sign On (SSO) technology. Any user who has logged on to Athens can now automatically be recognised and will be directed to their local OpenURL resolver. This extends the coverage of the OpenURL Router, with over 96% of requests now being directed to local resolvers.
Resolvers registered with the OpenURL Router will automatically benefit from links in all EDINA bibliographic services, and subscribers to Ovid services can request links using the OpenURL Router.
The next phase of the OpenURL Router project is promotion with service providers, to raise awareness of the benefits of using the Router.
More information about the OpenURL Router, including how to register your resolver.
by Andrew Bevan
EDINA is pleased to announce the availability of 30-day institutional trials for Index to The Times, 1790-1980 from October onwards, ahead of the renewed subscription period commencing 1 November 2004 to 31 October 2007.
The JISC/Chadwyck-Healey Index to The Times was the first agreement in 2001 to apply pricing in line with the ten JISC institutional bands. Pricing under the new agreement has been greatly reduced for most institutions, following a consultation exercise by JISC earlier this year. Another change is that EDINA will now directly deal with subscription payments rather than JISC.
Further information including trial and subscription details.
by Paul Milne
Our readers may have already noticed that the EDINA web site has a new look. We have tried to give our web pages a fresh, up-to-date look, whilst keeping the same basic structure and usefulness to the web site.
The "web rooms" on the home page have been slightly re-organised, and brief news headlines can also be found there now. The ubiquitous drop-down menu of services has been replaced by a list of services on the home page, and a link on the top menu to a page of EDINA Services.
Navigation has been split into two sections: the links across the top of each page giving access to information about EDINA and getting around the site, in addition to the service page link. The links on the left take you to service support and subscription information, and to news and events information.
We hope you like the new look. We will continue to improve the site as EDINA itself continues to grow and develop.
Over the past year there have been a few changes in the staffing at EDINA. Here is a brief synopsis of the coming and goings.