Newsline from EDINA
October 2004: Volume 9, Issue 3
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.