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Contents1. Director’s introduction ................................................................................................................................................. 1!2. Highlights in our Year, 2008/2009 ............................................................................................................................... 2!Providing Managed Access to Licensed Resources........................................................................................................ 2!Open Access to Community-Generated Content ............................................................................................................ 4!Tools to Help Ensure Continuity of Access to Scholarly Output.................................................................................... 5!Other Highlights ............................................................................................................................................................. 6!3. Meeting our goals .......................................................................................................................................................... 8!Manage and present a portfolio of data services and projects relevant to need............................................................ 8!Provide quality assured services for client communities........................................................................................... 8!Enhance content and collection development............................................................................................................ 8!Present a coherent and useful service portfolio ......................................................................................................... 9!Gain understanding by undertaking research into innovative services and enhancements ..................................... 10!Increase usefulness and relevance of EDINA services and project activity................................................................. 14!Provide effective outreach and support services...................................................................................................... 14!Enhance accessibility of services............................................................................................................................. 16!Gain leverage from inter-working, in UK and internationally ................................................................................ 17!Develop interoperable services and infrastructure................................................................................................... 19!Sustain and develop a well-founded UK national academic data centre..................................................................... 21!Provide effective governance and management of resources .................................................................................. 21!Enhance resource base through technology and staff talent .................................................................................... 22!Develop quality technical capability........................................................................................................................ 22!Ensure EDINA’s long-term sustainability ............................................................................................................... 23!4. Corporate Report ........................................................................................................................................................ 25!a. Management Board .................................................................................................................................................. 25!b. Management Team.................................................................................................................................................... 26!c. Statement of expenditure, 2008-2009 ....................................................................................................................... 26!d. Funding..................................................................................................................................................................... 26!e. Staff at EDINA and Data Library ............................................................................................................................. 27!5. Forward Look .............................................................................................................................................................. 28!Strategic business areas ............................................................................................................................................... 29!Scholarly communications....................................................................................................................................... 29!Geospatial ................................................................................................................................................................ 29!Learning & Teaching ............................................................................................................................................... 29!Multimedia............................................................................................................................................................... 29!Access Management ................................................................................................................................................ 29!

EDINA Annual Review 2008/20091. Director’s introductionOur task here is to review the activities that EDINA carried out last year in its role as a UK national academicdata centre. Innovation is becoming a keyword, signaling a place for organisations that can transform R&D intoproducts and services – in order, as EDINA’s mission, to enhance research, learning and teaching, in the UKand beyond. Increasingly this means an international as well as a national role.EDINA excels in the business areas of geospatial, scholarly communication, multimedia, learning resources, aswell in the ‘middleware’ areas of interoperability and access management. We do so as an established part of theUK digital library, working with the academic support staff within institutions in the Higher and FurtherEducation (H/FE) sectors that subscribe to EDINA services. EDINA is also steadily contributing throughactions to support continuity of access to scholarly resources, and in particular to that contained in e-journalcontent. We have continued to develop close links with national partners, especially those in the ‘JISC family’and with international groups, whether governmental, educational, standards development, research data,commercial or web-services.We begin this Review with highlights of our year and then report against the strategic goals and objectives thatwe set ourselves for 2008-2009. This includes a wide range of services and projects, with highly rated, first classsupport through the EDINA helpdesk, augmented by subject experts within user support, and high qualitycontext sensitive help and online documentation.This past year, the academic year 2008-2009, will be remembered as significant for external events affecting theworld’s finances and economy. What that now means for research and education in the UK is still uncertain.Much depends upon how the sector is regarded by Government in its importance to long-term recovery and wellbeing, as the size of public debt requires long term remedy. There is much talk about demonstrating impact inthe sector, but it is important to moderate this with some assessment and mitigation of the negative impact thatcould be inflicted upon real capacity and performance. As is made evident here, EDINA has a record ofachievement in 2008-2009, and a strong base on which to build network-level infrastructure in order to delivercost-effective common services that add real value. This should not be undermined by short-term actions, butrather the opportunity should be taken to build capacity for the long-term.Peter BurnhillDirector, EDINA1

EDINA Annual Review 2008/20092. Highlights in our Year, 2008/2009With a mission to enhance research, learning and teaching in the UK, our principal task is to innovate bydeveloping and delivering first-rate online services. This we do; in 2008/2009, we hosted 22 national services,some as managed access, with over 500 institutions holding licences to use at least one EDINA service, andincreasingly we host services that support open access. In terms of market coverage, we deliver ‘non-openaccess’ to almost all universities (over 97%) and to two-thirds of colleges within the UK. Another way of gaugingsuccess is to calculate the total number of institutional licences issued for EDINA services: in 2008/2009, theserose to 1565 (from 1550 and 1300 in the two previous years), due mainly to the launch of the popular NewsFilmOnline service (see below). Looking beyond institutional licensing, EDINA has made a significant contributionduring 2008/2009 to the significance of the growth of open access and community generated content forresearch, learning and teaching.It is therefore indicative that EDINA started and ended the academic year by co-hosting a JISC-fundedRepository Fringe event, together with Information Services colleagues in the Digital Curation Centre and theLibrary and Collections Division, as well as UKOLN, EPrints and the University’s School of Informatics. Over80 delegates attended the event on 31 July /1 August 2008, with two plenary speakers, Dorothea Salo (Universityof Wisconsin) and David De Roure (Southampton); short “Soapbox” parallel sessions; “Group Improv”sessions (provoking audience participation) and “An Audience With …” presentations. The second event,Beyond the Repository Fringe 2009, closed the year, on 30 /31 July 2009 1 . Keynote speakers were Ben O’Steen &Sally Rumsey (Oxford University Library Services), and Clifford Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information).With talk of a UK research data service, it is also worth remarking on the gathering of friends and colleaguesfrom near and far, to celebrate 25 years of the Data Library through seminar and social hospitality 2 on 5December 2008. It was Edinburgh University Data Library that the University put forward and was initiallydesignated as a national academic data centre, before we renamed it EDINA at its launch. As all remarked,‘knowing how to do data’ is now acknowledged as a key set of skills, with the Data Library having a“practitioner’s” advocacy role through DISC-UK 3 and DataShare 4 . It forms part of the ‘EDINA and DataLibrary’ unit within Information Services at the University of Edinburgh to support their staff and students indiscovery, access, use and management of research datasets.Providing Managed Access to Licensed ResourcesThe JISC data centres were established to enable shared access to third-party licensed content. The start of theacademic year saw the final changeover for most EDINA services in the way that access is managed, through useof Shibboleth in the UK Access Management Federation, away from using Athens as the mode ofauthentication. The changeover was challenging, with most institutions making a smooth transition (especiallythose who had considered the issues in good time) in their responsibility for authentication, and revocation.EDINA played an essential part in the national transition, first in the R&D work that tested Shibboleth in a pilotfederation, and then through its role as technical operator and metadata manager for the community, workingwith the designated federation operator JANET(UK) with whom there is now a Memorandum ofUnderstanding. The UK Federation is the largest deployment of Shibboleth, with Membership now exceeding730 (up from 500), with entities (Identity Providers (IdPs) and Service Providers (SPs)) numbering almost 900.EDINA is also a centre of expertise in identity management for JISC. In 2008/2009, the focus was on1 http://wiki.repositoryfringe.org/index.php/Main_Page2 http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/25anniversary/index.html3 http://www.disc-uk.org/4 http://datashare.edina.ac.uk/dspace/2

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009developing specifications for using Shibboleth in the schools sector and working with international colleagues todefine the technical basis for inter-federation operation.The formal launch of NewsFilm Online 5 (NFO) on 3 October 2008 was another highlight near the start of theacademic year. Held in London’s Soho Hotel the NFO service was commended by Mark Wood, Chief Executiveof ITN and Malcolm Read OBE, JISC Executive Secretary. A long-standing supporter of Newsfilm Online,journalist Jon Snow of Channel 4 News declared his enthusiasm on screen in a video showreel. NFO hasenjoyed rapid uptake and success with the user interface provided by EDINA. By 31 July 2009, 306 institutionshad registered for the service, which provides access to over 3,000 hours of downloadable television news andcinema newsreels from the ITN/Reuters archives. Over the year there were 27,500 user sessions, 65% in HEand 35% in FE.Education Image Gallery (EIG) 6 , an existing service to H/FE, was also launched in October to the schoolssector, as part of the JISC Collections for Schools initiative, funded by Becta. This service provides access to60,000 images from Hulton Archive, Photodisc and the Getty Images ® News Service. The service interface wasrefreshed and updated for all users in January 2009, and picture trails show at a glance the diversity and depth ofthe resources to be found in the service. The number of H/FE, subscriptions continued to increase, a 10% risefrom 2008 to 121. There were over 25,000 user sessions, 83% in HE and 17% in FE.One less happy event was news in 2009 that as part of the JISC Portfolio Review, JISC has decided to withdrawfunding from the Film & Sound Online (FSOL) 7 service. When announced this had implications for itsfunding for the year 2009-2010, but this would now seem to follow guidelines and withdrawal will be in the yearfollowing, 2010-2011. Film & Sound Online is a set of collections of film and video covering a wide range ofsubjects. This has continued growth in institutional uptake (a 7% rise from 2008 to 382), and in content, withtitles from the new Wellcome Film collection being added from February 2009, and three new case studies alsoadded. Over the year there were about 64,000 user sessions, 90% in HE and 10% in FE. Our plan, currentlyunder discussion with JISC, is to seek ways of continuing to offer access to these FSOL collections, perhaps via asingle, unified graphical user interface to all the multimedia collections, even with a cut in funding.November 2008 marked the launch of two geospatial services that made the transition from project into service:Go-Geo! and GeoCrossWalk. These are significant components within the emergent UK academic Spatial DataInfrastructure (SDI). Both are good examples of successful innovation, turning the product of R&D intoproducts for use, and this is described in detail in Section 3. Finding good exit strategies and agreement withJISC, or any other funding body, on transition support to test deployment is a fundamental challenge forinnovation.Functionality developed in the GeoCrossWalk project, now branded Unlock, can help with data and resourcelinking and improving the metadata describing scholarly works. More information about Unlock may be foundon page 20.There were also changes in 2008/2009 to the Digimap services, some less obvious to the growing user base 8 . Inparticular, the move to OS MasterMap and GML has been relatively smooth; any consternation amongst usersabout the removal of Land-Line.Plus data in August has proved significantly less than anticipated, as efforts byboth EDINA and local support staff to facilitate the transition have paid off. MasterMap Topography Layer isthe replacement for LandLine.Plus. Since the launch of MasterMap Download in September 2007, users have5 http://www.nfo.ac.uk/6 http://edina.ac.uk/eig/7 http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/8 Use of the Digimap Ordnance Survey (OS) Collection continued to grow considerably in 2008-2009, with some39,000 active registered users from 161 universities and colleges using the service. Although the number of sessionsremained at an average of 20,000 per month, the creation of maps for printing continued to increase to nearly 145,000in the 2008-2009 academic session. Users downloaded a quarter of a million data files of Ordnance Survey products in2008-2009 (this figure excludes the OS MasterMap data).3

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009provide an area for those with interests in sharing, reusing and repurposing learning resources. Jorum isdeveloped and hosted with Mimas, the JISC-supported national data centre at the University of Manchester.Keen focus on work to determine the licensing regimes to support OER allowed launch in March 2009 of a toolfor early deposits into what is being referred to as JorumOpen. There was also an appraisal of the softwareplatform, which resulted in an implementation of DSpace alongside that of intraLibrary to support all the newservice options.The Depot is being well regarded by advocates of open access. Following the publication of an optionsappraisal, consultation during March to September determined that the Depot was a network level service thatwould add significant value in promoting the open access agenda internationally. It was launched as such later inthe year to coincide with Open Access Week in October 2009. The project funding from JISC for itsdevelopment had ended in March JISC as it judged that the Depot had done its job by providing the UKacademic community with an online deposit facility for Open Access self-archiving during the interim periodwhile Institutional Repositories (IRs) were being set up. Its ‘repository junction’ functionality is being generalisedas middleware for all repositories to use.Not all sharing is with ‘open’ materials, and in many instances open material contains some reference to ‘nonopen’licensed material from third parties. EDINA has been pioneering the investigation into strategies forsharing within a licensed community through Jorum and with the ShareGeo repository, which was launched inJanuary 2009. Developed in a JISC funded-project, ShareGeo allows users to share and re-use derivedgeospatial datasets within the Digimap service under the JISC Collections licensing arrangements. It allows datasharing to take place that would otherwise not have been previously possible due to restrictions on reuse oflicensed data. It also provides a potential platform for open access material. During the remainder of 2008/2009,93 datasets were made available for download, with over 1000 logins and over 500 downloads. As EDINAreceives no funding from third parties to operate ShareGeo, this experiment will be reviewed during 2009/2010as a critical component in the evolving UK academic SDI.Tools to Help Ensure Continuity of Access to Scholarly OutputSUNCAT provides an important nexus between the open and the tollgate world in scholarly communication,and provides a locus for assessing how to ensure good and efficient current access to journal content withstewardship for access over the longer term. SUNCAT, in its third full year of service as the first nationalcatalogue of serials for the UK, can be regarded as three distinct activities. First, SUNCAT Open providescoherent and ready means for researchers and students to discover and locate serial content across the UK. Twosurveys were carried out during the year, one being a follow up of an earlier survey carried out in 2007, findingimprovement in satisfaction levels: 92% of respondents experienced good or excellent satisfaction usingSUNCAT, attributed to enhancement of the user interface whereby library locations alongside each title in theResults List. The second, SUNCAT Platform, saw the number of contributing libraries rise to 70, and the start ofa review of the underlying design and choice of underlying software. The third activity, SUNCAT Strategic,underpinned the variety of projects in which EDINA is currently engaged in three key initiatives geared atensuring continuity of scholarly content – with particular focus on journal content - over the medium and longerterm.A JISC funded one-year project in 2008/2009 – Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas (D2D) – hasexpanded the functionality of SUNCAT. The most important development was the building of linkages betweenSUNCAT and the Zetoc (Tables of Contents service) operated by Mimas, to launch in Autumn 2009.EDINA has long-standing expertise in managing e-journal content, playing a leading role in such initiatives asthe UK LOCKSS Alliance, CLOCKSS, PEPRS and PECAN (all described further below), and can also assistthose with expertise in managing print journal collections, such as the UK Research Reserve (UKRR) initiative.5

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009At the start of 2008/2009 EDINA agreed to take on support for the UK LOCKSS Alliance, as this movedfrom a two-year pilot project mode at the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) into a sustainable service mode. TheUK LOCKSS Alliance is a cooperative movement of UK academic libraries that are committed to identify,negotiate, and build local archives of material that librarians and academic scholars deem significant. It used theLots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) technology in order to ensure that libraries remain central to theprocess of scholarly information management. It is also preparing to act as a focal point for discussion on theissues of journal preservation and rights management.EDINA is also acting in a support role for initiative taken by the University of Edinburgh as one of sevenfounding libraries in CLOCKSS, which moved to full service in 2008 - Edinburgh becoming the Archive Nodein Europe among a global network of eleven steward libraries. Fund-raising for endowment began to provide thenecessary financial sustainability of CLOCKSS.EDINA, together with Stanford University Libraries, acts as a designated Open Access host for ‘orphaned’journal content when a trigger event is confirmed. To date three sets of content have been released, both testingthe readiness of the CLOCKSS system and making available under Open Access journal articles that mightotherwise have been lost to global scholarship.It is encouraging that a variety of archiving initiatives are emerging but it is then important to know who islooking after what. PEPRS (Piloting an E-Journals Preservation Registry) is a JISC-funded project, in whichEDINA is partnering with the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) International Centre, to scope,develop and test an online facility that will keep track of which e-journals are being kept safe by digitalpreservation agencies for future use.At the end of 2008-2009 EDINA joined with JISC Collections and Content Complete to begin a five-monthstudy - PECAN (Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of access via NESLi2) - to scope what is required to supportpost cancellation access to back copy of e-journal content.The project envisages two facilities: a registry of entitlement (which has reliable information on the journalcontent that has been subscribed to by libraries via NESLi2) and a secure virtual archive (providing secure androbust access to back journal content).Further information about PEPRS and PECAN may be found in Section 3.Other HighlightsLast year was also a busy one for UKBORDERS, an ESRC funded component in the Census Programmewhich provides end-user access to a large online ‘filing cabinet’ of digitised boundaries and the postcodedirectory to support geo-linking, and now makes this available as a back-end web service (OGC Web FeatureService) to other services. Support for researchers extended to a special derived boundary for the ONS LabourForce Survey (Berrington & Stone, Population Trends, 2009). Attention was also given to the production ofeLearning modules: ‘Understanding the geography of the UK’, and two on accessing and using ‘digitalboundaries and geographic look up table datasets’ - all three deposited in Jorum.The Geoservices team has continued to advance thinking within the geospatial arena both nationally andinternationally with its work on security, semantics, knowledge infrastructures and interoperability. Like manyorganisations within the UK and the rest of Europe, it is attempting to understand the ramifications for UKacademia of the EU INSPIRE Directive which has the intention of opening up to wider use a large number ofenvironmental and environmentally related datasets held by member state organisations. In the UK there is alsothe government’s Location Strategy, which is being implemented through the Location Programme. EDINAhas been advising JISC on both of these strategically important initiatives, liaising with the Research Councilsand the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Higher Education representative on the LocationCouncil.6

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The Statistical Accounts of Scotland is an online version of the full text of two accounts of Scottish parishesconducted in the 1790s and 1830s, published as the First and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland. An onlinepayment system that enabled users to subscribe to The Statistical Accounts of Scotland service for periods oftwo, six or twelve months was developed and yielded 20 subscriptions during 2008/2009.Land Life Leisure is a weekly updated digest of press releases, reports and articles in the field of ruralinformation. A rebranding exercise took place early in 2009, which resulted in a change to the service name(from Land, Life & Leisure to Land Life Leisure). A new logo and interface were also introduced and supportdocumentation was updated. The subscription base to the service remained at around 40 separate, university,college and non-academic organisations, including the existing consortium of public libraries in West Wales.Tobar an Dualchais is a multi-million-pound Heritage Lottery-funded project, which will preserve, digitise andmake available online more than 12,000 hours of recordings from the archives of BBC Scotland, the NationalTrust for Scotland and the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The Tobar an Dualchaisproject is based at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic-language college on Skye. EDINA and the University ofEdinburgh Information Services (IS) were contracted in 2007 to produce a Production Control Application anda Cataloguing Application (for web-based input of metadata) and EDINA will develop and host the OnlineService and Searchable Catalogue. An initial prototype of the new Tobar an Dualchais website, was madeavailable for user testing in July 2009.In 2008-2009, EDINA applied design project management and usability testing in the visual design stage toinform the production of new interfaces for EIG, NFO, Digimap ROAM and Tobar an Dualchais. Short onlinetraining sessions were introduced, using a web conferencing service that enabled more frequent interaction withsite representatives across the UK than is possible with face-to-face training alone.7

EDINA Annual Review 2008/20093. Meeting our goalsThis section of the Annual Review describes what EDINA has done in 2008-2009 to meet the strategic goalsand themes that were described in its rolling three-year Strategy for 2008-2011. (Goals and themes altered in theStrategies for 2009-12 and 2010-13.)Manage and present a portfolio of data services and projectsrelevant to needProvide quality assured services for client communitiesThe aim is for EDINA services to be available 24 hours per day, seven days a week, with a target of 99% uptimeover a twelve-month rolling period. In 2008-2009, all multimedia and bibliographic services achieved the 99%uptime with a dip to 98.49% occasioned by a multiple disk hardware failure for SUNCAT - scheduled downtimefor maintenance resulted in three existing disks being replaced rather than upgraded, resulting in a longer periodof downtime than planned.The uptime for Digimap Collection services and components had been under strain, because of ageing softwarefirst introduced in 2000-2001, but still ranging from 97.45% – 98.85%. New software (from Cadcorp) launchedin September 2009 is radically improving both performance and uptime. (As an indicator of ‘back-end’performance, each of the three Cadcorp Geognosis servers has served approximately 7 million maps into thecache since early October, enabling 27,000 map requests to be met in the short period of 28 th October to 6 thNovember. This would have been inconceivable with the older software.)The EDINA Helpdesk was staffed during normal office hours throughout the year and exceeded performancetargets for query resolution.Unlike physical servers there is no annual limit on scheduled service downtime. Thirteen services at EDINA hadmore than 624 minutes of scheduled downtime in 2008-2009, but the JISC Executive acknowledged thatadditional maintenance time was needed for the geospatial services at EDINA until the move to Cadcorp hadtaken place.All machine and Local Area Network availability measures were above their agreed Service Levels.Enhance content and collection developmentIn 2008-2009, JISC provided Capital funding to undertake the following enhancements:• Complete the Digimap mapping platform re-engineering for Phase 2: SeaZone Marine Collection,Geology Collection, and Historic Collection;• Fund the Digimap Alternative Access Scoping Study - Mobile and Web Services on distributedcomputing paradigms (2 projects);• Investigate the feasibility and cost of adding functionality (search and browse by place) to NewsFilmOnline (NFO), Education Image Gallery and Film and Sound Online;• Crosslink British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND) and NFO; expose NFO service metadata toGoogle and other search engines; and engineer a simple browse by download for NFO.The funding runs from April 2009 – March 2010, and work commenced on most areas during the 2008-2009year.During 2008/2009 EDINA took delivery of large-scale historical Town Plan data from Landmark InformationGroup. Over the coming year work will be done to offer these through Historic Digimap.8

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The British Geological Survey are very happy with the uptake of Geology Digimap, and have been drawing up alist of other data sets that might be added to the collection at no extra cost to JISC Collections. Various otherapproaches have been made to EDINA about additional Collections for Digimap. For example, the NERCCentre for Ecology and Hydrology are talking to JISC Collections and EDINA about making their new LandCover Map (LCM) available to UK academia through Digimap.Delivery of the new WellcomeFilm collection to FSOL began in February 2009 and is scheduled to continueuntil December 2009. A total of 258 new films had been added by 31 July 2009. The service continued to offeraccess to three film trails and 47 reviews. Three new case studies were added in 2008-2009, making 11.Liaison continued with the multi-institution HE Academy project led by Glasgow University tasked withproducing exemplars of the use of NewsFilm Online content in a number of different subject areas in HE. Acommenting facility has been developed during 2009, with the intention to include it in service in Autumn 2009.EIG provides access to a collection of some 60,000 images, augmented every year by c. 3,000 new images,delivered as monthly updates.Correspondence including letters from parish ministers to Sir John Sinclair relating to the Statistical Accounts ofScotland; and from Sir John to individual parish ministers encouraging them to forward the statistical account oftheir parish, and the original correspondence received by Sir John Sinclair regarding the parish of Forganny wereadded to the subscription service during 2008/2009.SALSER, the serials catalogue for Scottish academic and research libraries, was updated in 2009. After muchpreparatory work, progress was made in making SALSER more current. The Scottish libraries that contributedata to SUNCAT also have it loaded into SALSER now, Stirling University being the latest contributor. OtherScottish libraries make regular updates. Several libraries began contributing once again, including GlasgowCaledonian University and Glasgow School of Art. The SALSER team continued their communication withother libraries and hope that some holdings will be updated later in 2009, and new libraries added.Agcensus provides grid square agricultural census data for England, Scotland and Wales, and was accessed by 17academic and non-academic organisations in 2008-2009. During the year a significant enhancement was made tothe service to enable the creation of agricultural census ‘Mash-ups’ with a new ‘KML’ output added to thestandard CSV format. KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is a file format that uses XML-based language tomanage geographic information. The EDINA agcensus data is offered for download in OGC Standard KML.UKBORDERS is an integral part of the ESRC Census Programme, for which EDINA acts as the GeographyData Unit.A set of learning objects was produced by an e-learning developer on a short-term contract, and experts in UserSupport, covering geographic concepts for census data learning. A consultant created other online learningmaterials, which demonstrate the principle of having open materials in Jorum that link to authenticated materialsin other services provided by EDINA.Present a coherent and useful service portfolioEDINA seeks to provide a coherent and useful service portfolio to its client communities. Management of eachindividual service lifecycle and how it relates to other services in the portfolio was identified as a crucial factor inachieving this objective, and a number of cross-service groups were established in 2008-2009 to share expertiseacross the data centre.Go Geo! and GeoCrossWalk were selected by JISC as pilot cases to test its then-new transition from project toservice process, and enabled EDINA to develop expertise in this important area.9

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Gain understanding by undertaking research into innovative services andenhancementsEDINA exists to add value to the work of our communities by developing and delivering common services atthe ‘network-level’. Determining what adds value and how we can arrive at the position to deliver takesinvestment in understanding. By undertaking innovative R&D work, EDINA seeks to gain that understandingand play our part in shaping the future 9 .Personalisation projectsDuring 2008-2009, EDINA has been investigating how services can be presented and personalised to addresschanging information seeking and user practices. A seven-month project funded by JISC commenced inFebruary 2009, which has been exploring mechanisms to support personalisation across the JISC IE. It followson from the Developing Personalisation for the Information Environment (DPIE) programme of work, wherethe final reports from the DPIE1 and DPIE2 projects highlighted tagging and personalised search andrecommendation engines as areas for further work. Two ‘rapid’ demonstrators were designed and built atEDINA to demonstrate:• Location-based searching for JISC IE services: by taking location information on resources (and services) andusing these to sort and rank the results of searches on the basis of geographic proximity to a user-definedlocation.• Management and use of service-content references via a shared middleware service: by investigating use of a referencelinking knowledge base, with a focus on multimedia resources, that could act as middleware forpersonalisation actions by services into the JISC IE.EDINA has been developing a middleware location service for third-party services to use to query and set users’location preferences. Other service providers can exploit these preferences in order to personalise their services.The work undertaken for the project was guided by the requirements of a simple use case, namely that a user isinterested in locating libraries that are close to their current location and that hold a copy of a journal article theyhave found using a resource discovery tool. For the purposes of the project a demonstrator was written that usesthe Scholarly Communications website to identify journal articles and then uses the geolocation middleware, toreturn a result set geographically sorted based on their proximity to the user.Geospatial projectsIn 2008-2009, EDINA began to play its part in the EU-funded European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network(ESDIN) project, helping to develop a best practice network and to evaluate the theory of integrating nationalSDIs. EDINA is involved in several work packages relating to technical architecture, including metadata, dataquality control, data schemas transformation and interoperability services. EDINA is contributing experiencegained during the EuroGlobalMap (EGM) pilot and its wider experience of providing geographic informationinto the tertiary academic sector, as well as bringing European academic users to the ESDIN. ESDIN is underthe leadership of EuroGeographic, which represents 52 national mapping and cadastral agencies from 43countries across Europe.EuroGeoNames (EGN), a European e-Contentplus-funded 30-month project, ended in February 2009. TheEuropean Commission considered it a great success. The project team developed a federated gazetteerinfrastructure, local services and middleware service architecture for pan-European access to official geographicalnames data. EDINA assumed responsibility for developing the gazetteer data model and the application schema.The project consortium brought together partners from the public, academic and private sectors, embracing thefull ‘value chain’, from data providers to technology partners to value added service retailers. EuroGeographic isnow taking the project forward as a European-wide service.9 Further information about EDINA projects may be found at: http://edina.ac.uk/projects/10

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The GeoDigRef project investigated the utility of enhancing existing digitised resources through better indexingof resources. Specifically, it looked at how geographic referencing of resources via automatic tools (the‘GeoParser’) might be useful in developing improved geographical search capacities across collections. Usingthree distinct resource collections, and by building two distinct search and browse interfaces, the project showedhow a new dimension to search – the ‘where’ aspect of resources – can be better exploited and may be added toexisting collections with relative ease and at little cost. This project provided an exemplar for the broader aim ofgeo-enablement across the JISC Information Environment, the ultimate aim being to ensure that discovery viageography (the ‘where’ component of resources which is a cross-cutting constant across the majority ofcollections e.g. country, place name, postcode, parish name etc) becomes more widely embedded into searchparadigms within the JISC IE. The project ran for six months from November 2008.The Geospatial Application Profile (GAP) project commenced in April 2008. Within the Discovery to Deliveryarea of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme, the need for domain specific specialist metadataprofiles for purposes of search and discovery across institutional repositories was identified. Subsequently workfunded by JISC commissioned a series of Application Profiles of which the Geospatial Application Profile(GAP) was one (others being the Scholarly Works Profile, Image Profile and Time Based Media Profile). Usingexisting community-adopted open metadata standards, GAP leveraged well-established international standards indescribing geospatial resources within a Dublin Core Application Profile. Uptake and embedding work iscontinuing; however, wider uptake has stalled while JISC makes a decision on whether spatial should be includedwithin other Application Profiles.The Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship (COMPASS) project was funded by JISCunder its Knowledge Organisation and Semantic Services Programme. Led by EDINA, the project broughttogether a consortium consisting of experts from the Semantic Interoperability Laboratory at MeunsterUnversity (Germany), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University Ireland, Galway andAllworlds Geothinking. The project ran from December 2007 to June 2009. COMPASS successfullydemonstrated how an ontologically supported knowledge infrastructure for the coastal marine environmentcould assist in the enhanced discovery, access and use of scientific resources such as data, journal articles,scientific models and web services. To build the knowledge infrastructure, COMPASS combined technologiesand open standards in the areas of metadata, registries, ontologies and digital libraries with a focus on thegeospatial domain.Access Management projectsDuring 2008/2009, the Access Management Expert Group was active in its collaboration with Internet2 (I2),attending I2 meetings and contributing to and advancing Shibboleth technology. The following software wasdeveloped by members of the expert group and released into the international Shibboleth community:• Version 2 Windows-based Quick IdP Installer. Like version 1, version 2 of the IdP installer provides amechanism to enable inexperienced users to get started quickly but includes more options at installationtime – so requiring less manual manipulation of configuration files. Version 2 supports the SAML 2protocol.• Discovery Service (next generation WAYF). The Discovery Service is designed to allow the exploitationof the more sophisticated features within the SAML 2 protocol to support discovery. It also includesmore intelligent searching for the user to select an IdP – a necessary requirement as federations get larger.Supporting the SAML 2 protocol provides the foundation to allow an SP to embed a WAYF interfacewithin their login page to effectively hide the existence of a separate Discovery Server from their users –an idea originally devised by SWITCH.The Expert group also worked with a small subgroup of Internet2 to develop a technical architecture to supporta practical method of inter-federation working. The work involved the development of an Aggregation Engine toallow the swapping of authorised metadata between federations with the intention that a prototype AggregationEngine will be developed early in 2010.11

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The work arising from the geospatial SEE-Geo has now been taken up in ESDIN (see page 10), and generatedlot of interest within the international geospatial community with an interest in secure interoperability.The outputs are feeding into the OGC standards process and being used within in an OGC InteroperabilityExperiment, a member of which is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in the US; and also within theEuropean geospatial testbed, where its use is being promoted as a way of managing access for academia to publicsector data sets.Scholarly Communications projectsThe JISC-funded Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas project, which began in August 2008 and endedin July 2009, developed functionality such that users could discover resources on the existing Copac andSUNCAT services and then link from journal titles to Tables of Contents for issues of a journal (using Zetoc), aswell as being presented with a series of options which link to systems and services offering Interlibrary Lending,licensed electronic resources, free resources and pay to view resources. A Scholarly Communications website hasbeen developed as a potential means to gather and present information in this key area.This project has highlighted the strategic role for SUNCAT as a modern locate facility. Having identified aparticular journal title, SUNCAT users are now able to display all the articles in the latest issue of the journal and,if appropriately licensed, view the full text. In those cases where a user is not licensed to access the full text, it ispossible to pay to receive hard copy available through the British Library Direct Service. This facility is due to beimplemented in the SUNCAT service in Autumn 2009.Many UK universities and colleges maintain OpenURL link servers, which direct users to potential sources ofscholarly content. These transactions can be logged and then have the potential to be used in various ways. Theaim of the Shared OpenURL data infrastructure investigation project, which started in December 2008 andcompleted in July 2009, was to scope a UK architecture for the analysis of OpenURL linking data, with thearchitecture intended to provide a basis for ongoing services.Building on experience gained from ZBLSA JOIN-UP Project and GetCopy, the Scoping Study for a Low CostOpenURL Resolver for the JISC IE project, which completed in 2008, reviewed the requirements and means ofdelivering a low-cost OpenURL resolver service for the JISC IE which would provide means for staff andstudents at all UK universities and colleges to locate the ‘appropriate copy’ for a given bibliographic reference.The study scoped the feasibility and potential uptake of such a tool, including a gap analysis and requirementsanalysis. It also explored potential business models with estimated costs to support and sustain such a tool.The Xgrain 5/99 JOIN-UP project developed a broker for cross-searching abstracting and indexing services andelectronic tables of contents services within the JISC IE. This broker, offered as the GetRef service and used bythe University of Stirling as its federated search tool for a number of years, is likely to be withdrawn unless thereare requests to the contrary.The High-Level Thesaurus (HILT) project aims were to ensure that users of the JISC Information Environmentcould find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse. Phase Four ofthis project, led by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, ran from April 2007– May 2009. EDINA provided programming support for development of the SRW client; advice onperformance and interface issues; hosted the SRW server; and tested embedding of HILT in a developmentversion of the Depot.EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit) was a one-year project that started inMarch 2008. It was funded by JISC and carried out in partnership with Textensor Limited. It demonstratedmiddleware that enabled easier deposit of research papers through batch upload of structured bibliographicmetadata from existing sources. It also had the potential to enhance metadata deposit through transfers and redirectsto institutional repositories (IRs). The new workflow and sample user interface developed by the projectcould help researchers maintain their publications list web page (such as that at PublicationsList.org) which12

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009would then be sent in batch mode to a repository (such as the Depot) by pressing a ‘Deposit’ button, bringingthe effort required to send all publications to a repository to just a few clicks.The EM-loader prototype was shortlisted for an award at Repository Challenge, an informal competition at theOpen Repositories 09 conference at Atlanta, Georgia.During 2008-2009, plans were laid for a related JISC-funded project entitled ‘Open Access Repository Junction(OA-RJ). This 20 month project aims to develop the ‘repository junction’ functionality in the Depot, which redirectspotential depositors to the website of their institutional repository, into a stand-alone broker mechanismwhich can be easily adopted and integrated by services or projects run by other institutions or organisations.More specifically, it is a practical investigation into the problems of repository deposit and interoperabilitycurrently faced by researchers who have written a multi-authored journal article from multiple institutions andgrant-funding organisations. This project will test the broker model against a number of use case scenarios thathave been identified by the SONEX group being supported by JISC for international collaboration. Theseinclude deposit by a Principal Investigator (PI) and by a publisher, of the authors’ final copy.Functionality developed in the GeoCrossWalk project, now branded Unlock, can help with data and resourcelinking and improving the metadata describing scholarly works. More information about Unlock may be foundon page 20.Continuing Access projectsPiloting an E-journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS) is a two-year project, which started in August 2008.The objective is to investigate and set-up a pilot service to provide librarians and policy makers with informationon provision for continuing access to the total corpus of scholarly work published in e-journals. Central toPEPRS is access to appropriate data created by the various agencies that have taken responsibility for preservingelectronic journals and providing access to them. The agencies involved in PEPRS are: Portico, LOCKSS,CLOCKSS, e-Depot (Koninklijke Bibliotheek – the National Library of the Netherlands) and the British Library.EDINA’s project partner is the International Standard Serial Number International Centre (Paris). The ISSN ICagreed to provide the project with access to the ISSN Register, a database containing details of all journals thathave been assigned an ISSN, of which approximately 66,000 are electronic serials. It is the intention to match uprecords of electronic journals that have been preserved by the agencies mentioned above with the informationabout those journals held in the Register thereby helping to provide users of the service with comprehensive andaccurate information. Papers on the project were published in two journals, and presentations have been made atconferences in four countries, reflecting the international character of this initiative. A paper, based on thepresentations, has also been submitted for publication.The Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of access via NESLi2 (PECAN) project is a five-month scoping study whichcommenced in July 2009. In order to assist UK HEIs with the procurement of electronic scholarly material, theJISC and JISC Collections support the scheme called NESLi2. The NESLi2 Model Licence contains a postcancellation clause but it is important that methods are devised to support its use, including a central local loadfacility for e-journal material. The PECAN project will investigate whether this framework could be extended toprovide the basis for more robust post-cancellation access arrangements between publishers and consumers of e-journal material.The project, led by JISC Collections, envisages two facilities: a registry of entitlement (which has reliableinformation on the journal content that has been subscribed to by libraries via NESLi2) and a secure virtualarchive (providing secure and robust access to back journal content). The project firstly aims to investigate therequired policy and procedures needed to establish an accurate registry of subscription information and, secondlyit aims to investigate and propose a candidate technical infrastructure for a central UK journal archive that wouldprovide appropriate controlled access to licensed material, in a robust and secure manner.13

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Multimedia projectsThe Visual and Sound Materials (VSM) Portal Project started in September 2005 over two phases, with a scopingstudy followed by the implementation of a portal demonstrator. In February 2009 JISC funded Phase Three, torun until autumn 2009. Further JISC funding for the project was indicated until 2011, dependent upon reviewby May 2010. The portal does not hold any media assets itself but allows users to search for such assets from agrowing number of collections and services (currently 15) using metadata held locally and cross-searched. PhaseThree activity has included incorporating the Wellcome Image and British Library Sound archives into the portal;contacting JISC Digitisation Phase 2 projects; seeking legal opinion on inclusion of YouTube content;application for a Flickr API token and incorporating YouTube into the portal. Work is currently underway withan external consultant to develop a new brand identity for the portal.The Tobar an Dualchais multimedia project was described in the Highlights section.Increase usefulness and relevance of EDINA services and projectactivityProvide effective outreach and support servicesEDINA’s policy on provision of documentation and help facilities is outlined in its Service Level Definitionavailable from JISC’s Monitoring Unit (MU) 10 .HelpdeskThe EDINA Helpdesk is the primary point of contact for all enquiries concerning EDINA services andsuccessfully resolves enquiries from end-users and support staff. Helpdesk staff categorise queries and enterthem in a call-logging system, which was updated in 2008-2009. Two new Helpdesk staff were recruited.Queries are mostly resolved directly by the Helpdesk staff or referred to experts inside and outside of EDINA asappropriate.EDINA provides technical and operational support to members of the UK Access Management Federation forEducation and Research through the federation operator JANET(UK). Support calls from members areforwarded from the JANET(UK) support desk to EDINA for resolution. While the User Support team atEDINA has sufficient experience and knowledge to resolve most technical and administrative queries, it has thebackup support of the SDSS Expert Group at EDINA to solve the more intractable problems.It is noticeable that while initial activity was supporting larger HE institutions, now queries are received fromsmaller academic institutions (HE and FE) and commercial publishers. The SDSS federation support team’sresources include a number of tools, mainly provided by the SDSS Expert group. These include test SPs andIdPs and certificate checkers. The latter are especially useful for advising federation members when certificatesare about to require renewal.EDINA websiteThe EDINA website continues to act as the main access point for users of its services. In 2008-2009, smallchanges were made to the site following the major re-launch in February 2008. Publicity material in the form ofthe well-established EDINA A5 flyers and A3 posters was produced and distributed. As with existing services,new services were documented by means of Quick Reference Guides, and with support material on the EDINAwebsite. In addition, individual posters were produced for exhibitions and to supplement the standard range ofmaterials. EDINA’s quarterly newsletter Newsline continued to play an important role in helping academicsupport staff and others with an interest in its services to keep abreast of developments.10 http://www.mu.jisc.ac.uk/slas/edina/14

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Service DemonstrationsEDINA continues to provide service demonstrations for new services and interface updates. The servicedemonstrations are produced using the screen capture software Camtasia in a wide range of formats. In addition,in 2008-2009, the initial steps were taken to produce animations for services and projects.Training16 training courses were designed and delivered by EDINA’s User Support team in 2008/2009.The content and delivery of courses was reviewed at the start of the year, in response to the content of a surveyof site representatives’ training needs at the end of academic year 2007/2008.Feedback from training course evaluation was positive, the majority of participants stating that courses were veryeffective in meeting their learning objectives. Trainers’ knowledge and presentation, and course materials weretypically rated as very good. New exercises were added to the training throughout the year, particularly to theDigimap Collections course. The content and delivery of face-to-face training courses was regularly reviewed andupdated to reflect the learning objectives of participants.A trial programme of short online training sessions, using a web conferencing subscription service, was run in2008/2009. The web conferencing service allows User Support more frequent interaction with siterepresentatives across the UK than is possible with face-to-face training alone. In addition to the coursesdetailed above, User Support staff also contributed significantly to three workshops run by the ESRC CensusProgramme at UK venues. EDINA staff delivered presentations and skills practice sessions on theUKBORDERS services at these workshops.Social MediaSocial Media has become an increasingly important part of EDINA communications and a Social Media Officerwas designated in May 2009. This role contributed to the social media element of service and projectdevelopment and outreach. The post also incorporates a watching and advisory role on social media tools andtrends.In 2008/2009, blogs for Digimap, SUNCAT, DISC-UK DataShare, ShareGeo, Land Life Leisure and Jorumcontinued to communicate service developments and news to EDINA service users, whilst a new Jorum Twitterstream (@Jorumteam) was also established in March 2009.In addition to attending numerous social media events, from BarCamps and a Facebook Symposium to theNeSC (National eScience Centre) Web 2.0 week, a number of presentations were delivered. EDINA was alsoinvolved in various event amplification activities such as the live tweeting of the CIGS “Metadata and Web 2.0”day in February 2009 and Skype participation in an “Improve Your Online Presence” Strategic ContentAlliance/Netskills workshop in July 2009. The “Beyond the Repository Fringe” event in July 2009 allowedEDINA to combine live blogging, twitter (and conference hashtags), streaming video, photo sharing and acollaborative wiki to build a sense of community and encourage discussion during and after the event.JISCmailEDINA continued to make use of various JISCmail lists to keep users and support staff informed of servicechanges, e.g. for Digimap Collections to encourage discussion about the service between users in differentinstitutions and disciplines. Other separate groups by email lists were contacted throughout the year withimportant announcements as well as to enlist volunteers for trials and early adopters to new services andprojects. A small number of user comments were submitted via feedback forms within service interfaces.Additionally comments received at events were fed back and acted on accordingly.GIS SupportSupport for spatial data and the use of GIS within institutions is significantly lacking across the academic sector.With the arrival of OS MasterMap and the more complex types of data in the other Collections offered throughDigimap, demand for support in using both the data and GI software will inevitably increase. EDINA is trying15

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009to respond and offered courses aimed at end users and not just site representatives. However, the lack of localsupport remains a concern.Beginning in June 2009, EDINA undertook a survey of institutional support staff to establish what support isprovided within UK academic institutions for the use of maps, spatial data and specialist GIS/CAD software, aswell as support for online geospatial resources. The work is being done in conjunction with the JISC GeospatialWorking Group, to which reports will be submitted when complete. One of the headline findings is that 48% ofsupport staff rated their institutions’ support for the use of GIS and geospatial resources as insufficient or nonexistent.SUNCATThe SUNCAT team conducted two surveys during 2008/2009. One addressed the issue of duplication, whilstthe other focused on Impact and Satisfaction for users of the service.CollaborationEDINA collaborated with other related providers in promoting and marketing its services. Examples includethe Census Registration Service (CRS) for UKBORDERS and JISC Digital Media for publicising the EducationImage Gallery. Links with the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs) continued. EDINA User Support staffattended several of their events throughout the year. A promotional webinar was run for Land Life Leisure.Organised by the RSC, this lunchtime event was attended virtually by 12 people from around the country as partof an ongoing series to showcase online resources.During the year, EDINA identified a number of relevant specialist conferences at which to exhibit e.g. GISRUK,UKSG and HE Academy.Enhance accessibility of servicesEDINA pays much attention to the presentation of its services in terms of utility and usability across the fullrange of users, including those with legacy hardware and browsers, inexperienced users, and those withdisabilities.In 2008-2009, the User Support team developed their knowledge of usability testing methods at a sessiondelivered by Guy Redwood from SimpleUsability. In addition, four members of User Support participated inUniversity of Edinburgh training sessions, ‘Testing the Usability of your website’. User testing of two EDINAservices, NFO and Digimap’s OS Collection, put the knowledge and skills gained from this training into practice.Paper prototyping was used to test the initial designs for both services. ‘Accompanied surfing’ was used toobserve how users performed tasks on the new interface designs. These sessions were recorded for analysis usingCamtasia. These usability-testing methods were also used to inform ongoing improvements to EDINA services,e.g. the development of a new full record page design for NewsFilm Online.EDINA recognises the growing user-base arising from delivery of service to a widening client community andintegration with other environments, especially those using mobile technologies.Funding was received in 2008-2009 to commence the Digimap Alternative Access Scoping Study, which willinvestigate the potential and the demand for mobile GIS in H/FE education and research. EDINA aims tounderstand the needs of the user community and suggest possible ways that allow the potential of mobile GIS tobe realised throughout the UK academic community. The project commenced in September 2009 and will runto April 2010.The Director of EDINA established a cross-service mobile Internet group in EDINA to discuss strategy andplanning for delivery of EDINA services to the mobile user. His aim was to have a generic/coherent view ofwhat is required to deliver mobile internet services, part of which is to work out what mobile equipment EDINArequires to support development and testing, and how this should be done. He also wanted this coupled withconsideration of which members of staff should be given mobile devices in order to do their jobs, and whatequipment they need.16

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009In 2008-2009, the cross-service group identified members of staff who were “networkers” and required mobiledevices to enable them to do their jobs more efficiently; staff members who went out occasionally, and wouldrequired a pool of devices to support them; and software engineers who required equipment to supportdevelopment and testing. A contract was taken out with O2 to provide mobile phones and broadband modems,while investment was also made in a number of netbooks and laptops.The growth in popularity of Web 2.0 social media and collaboration tools is also important for the support oflearning and research activity. Work in this area during 2008-2009 is detailed in the section above.Work done by EDINA in 2008-2009 on personalisation projects was described on page 10.Gain leverage from inter-working, in UK and internationallyEDINA works at local, national and international levels in each of its strategic business areas (SBAs), engaging ininitiatives that assist productivity in research, learning and teaching. It plans to further develop its links withimportant national and international groups, including governmental, educational, standards development,research data, commercial, web services and grid development organisations. Some of the JISC’s key strategictargets are expressed in contacts between EDINA and these organisations, and achieved in the joint workundertaken, for example, international collaboration to develop the E-Framework for Education and Research(see below). In addition, Research Council and EU activities in which EDINA is engaged give a focus tocollaboration and synergy. Its national and international contacts are also important for the University ofEdinburgh’s strategic aims as a world-class University seeking to enhance its global presence.Engagement on the European stage has special strategic significance for EDINA, JISC and the UK educationalcommunity. In addition, EDINA continues to value work with colleagues in North America and is laying thegroundwork for working with the emergent China through links with the Library of the Academy of Sciences.Geospatial activitySome of EDINA’s geospatial activities are world-class and especially important as the scientific communityprepares to implement the EU INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) Directive. This hasled to productive partnerships between EDINA and European organisations in the academic, commercial andgovernmental sectors seeking to implement the directive. For example, the Geo-services team has secured asubstantial role within the EU e-ContentPlus funded European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (ESDIN)project. This project gives EDINA added means to ensure academic sector interests are represented as theEuropean SDI is rolled out using the mechanism of the INSPIRE Directive. ESDIN also provides the meansfor EDINA to engage with national mapping agencies within Europe, and also with global initiatives such asGlobalMap. The team has also been working with Eurogeographics and the Association of GeographicInformation Laboratories for Europe (AGILE) to reveal the state of play within each European member stateregarding higher education access to national mapping agency data.The academic European persistent geospatial testbed being developed by the Association of GeographicInformation Laboratories Europe (AGILE) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), EuroSDR (effectivelythe research arm of the National Mapping and Charting Agencies represented at a European level), will continueto be a focus of activity for EDINA, with EDINA having specific involvement in aspects of the testbed relatingto service security.e-Framework activitiesThe e-Framework for Education and Research was initially established by JISC and Australia’s Department ofEducation, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), formerly the Department of Education, Scienceand Training (DEST). The New Zealand Ministry of Education (NZMoE) and the Netherlands SURFFoundation (SURF) joined in 2007. EDINA is participating in a number of e-Framework activities and has beeninvited by JISC to undertake an interoperability project with New Zealand, which will include the mapping ofgeospatial standards to the E-Framework for Education and Research.17

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Scholarly communicationsScholarly communications work in EDINA has close links with the major national and specialist libraries, as wellas libraries from some of the largest HE institutions in the UK. EDINA also has fruitful relationships withacademic and commercial partners, standards organisations, union catalogues of serials, especially across Europe,and international networks, particularly in the Open Access arena, which it will continue to develop. In 2008-2009, EDINA became a Sponsor of the DSpace Foundation. The Depot, a service that started as a nationalfacility to support UK/JISC policy for open access, is now an international facility to help authors releasematerial under terms of open access and deposit in their institutional repository. EDINA is also playing anactive part in the international work of the JISC Repositories Programme, through the SONEX Group (onscholarly output notification and exchange) and through use of the OA-Repository Junction project as testbedfor the use case scenarios identified by the SONEX Group.Continuing AccessEDINA has active commitment and responsibility for continuing access to the growing corpus of scholarlyresources in digital format, with the University of Edinburgh acting as the European Archive Node for theCLOCKSS digital preservation of e-journal content, with membership of the CLOCKSS Executive and itsGoverning Board. EDINA acts as an open access platform for orphaned e-journal content from the University’sArchive Node.Active participation in the ISSN Network continued, with attendance at two meetings in Paris and Tunisiaduring 2008/2009. The ISSN is a partner in the new PEPRS project. There was also contact with other nationalunion catalogues of serials, especially across Europe. A presentation of PEPRS was made at the 24 th AnnualConference of NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group), June 2009 in a strategy session in order to seekfeedback on project plans from a wider international community. A PEPRS briefing was also given at an ISSNDirectors meeting.DISC-UK DataShareThe DISC-UK DataShare project led by EDINA involved a consortium of repository managers and datalibrarians from the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Southampton. The project was completed in July2009, having produced a number of internationally recognised deliverables in addition to the plannedinstitutional repository enhancements. These included briefing papers, a Dublin Core metadata applicationprofile for datasets, institutional data audits, peer-reviewed articles, posters and talks at international conferences.Access ManagementMembers of the Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) team at EDINA provide expert supportto JISC and continue to work closely with colleagues in the ongoing development of the UK Federation forAccess Management; with the core developers in the Internet2/MACE committee to develop the base standards,protocols and core software; and with international adopters of Shibboleth technology. The team has contactwith the national federations in the USA, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, France, Norway, Sweden andDenmark.The adoption of SAML as a protocol and Shibboleth as the software foundation by an increasing number ofinternational access management federations (including the UK federation) mandated the development of stronglinks between EDINA and the international access management community. EDINA staff members wereinvolved with the development of the SAML2 protocol and have contributed to the Shibboleth code base.International ExpertiseSome EDINA/Data Library staff members are recognised internationally as experts in their fields. As well ascontributing Shibboleth core code, Rod Widdowson has been responsible for the development of the IdP QuickInstaller and the SAML2 Discovery Service (formally called the WAYF). Both of these applications reside onthe Shibboleth distribution site, available for international use.Ian Young of EDINA has worked with Chad La Joie, SWITCH (a core Shibboleth developer), to develop aprotocol and technical architecture for the aggregation and distribution of federation metadata to facilitate inter-18

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009federation working. It is expected that this work, which has been reviewed by Shibboleth experts from the USand a number of European federations, will lead to the building of a demonstrator metadata Aggregation Engineearly in 2010.The Head of EDINA’s Geo-services team, David Medyckyj-Scott, is currently acting on JISC’s behalf at theirrequest with respect to both INSPIRE and the UKSDI, brokering contact between the UK GovernmentDepartment with responsibility, DEFRA, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the JISCGeospatial Working Group. He is also an elected member of the Council of the Association of GeographicInformation Laboratories for Europe (AGILE).Another member of the Geo-services team, Chris Higgins, co-chairs the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)University Working Group, serves on the Management Committee of the European Persistent GeospatialTestbed for Research and Education, and is EDINA’s liaison with the Open Grid Forum (OGF).Robin Rice, the Data Librarian, is a member of the Administrative Committee of the International Associationfor Social Science Information Service and Technology (IASSIST). Stuart Macdonald, also of the Data Library,is Assistant Treasurer (Europe), IASSIST.Peter Burnhill has served as member or consultant on diverse international bodies, including the NationalInformation Standards Organisation (NISO) Working Group on Digital Rights Management (2000/1);MetaData Project, Data Dissemination Division, Statistics Canada (1989); and was an expert adviser to the ThirdExpert Meeting of the EU’s Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) (2006). He is a PastPresident of IASSIST. He has contributed to the Knowledge Exchange (KE), a pan-European initiative thataims to foster co-operation and collaboration between the four partner organisations (JISC, Danmark’sElektroniske Fag-og Forskningsbibliotek (DEF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany) andSURF Foundation (The Netherlands), recently attending a KE licensing workshop on digital preservation. Hepresented to the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Chengdu, China, and was involved in the ISSNDirectors’Meeting at the National Library of China, Beijing. He also presented at the recent conference of theSeventh Framework project, Permanent Access to the Records of Science in Europe (PARSE) in Darmstadt,Germany. He led the ‘Repository Handshake’ session at the International Repository Infrastructure Workshopin Amsterdam, March 2009. He has also continued to be involved with the group taking this strand of activityforward in the SONEX Group and attended the OAI Conference in Geneva in June 2009.The Datashare project manager, Robin Rice, went on a study tour of Australian and New Zealand institutionsengaged in developing services and policies for data management and recorded her impressions on theDataShare project blog. She was invited to lead seminars at both the University of Sydney and MonashUniversity in Melbourne – a podcast of the latter has been posted. The final project deliverable, “Policy-makingfor Research Data in Repositories: A Guide,” was used by the project team to conduct two successful trainingevents; one at the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST)conference in Tampere, Finland, and one at the Beyond the Repository Fringe event in Edinburgh.Develop interoperable services and infrastructureEDINA has implemented various established standards for interoperability in services and projects, includingZ39.50, SRU/W, OpenURL and OAI/PMH. Z39.50 and SRU/W provides search and retrieval of metadataacross bibliographic and multimedia services, and are heavily used for federated searching. OpenURL providescontext-sensitive linking from bibliographic services, and is used for linking to institutional OpenURL resolvers(link servers). OAI/PMH provides metadata harvesting.Web Services and RESTful services were used during project development, including the VSM portal and theHILT project, as a solution for interoperability requirements and were used in services, e.g. Digimap,UKBORDERS and Go-Geo! In the wider geospatial community, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is atthe forefront of developing and promoting open standards for the exchange, discovery, exploitation and rightsmanagement of geographic information. These subsequently become ISO standards. EDINA has been an19

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009associate member of the OGC for several years, and is actively engaged in implementing OGC interoperabilitystandards as well as contributing to the development of new standards or profiles of existing standards. (Forexample, staff members within the geo-services team have been working with the leader of the OGC SecurityWorking Group on an architecture for securing OGC Web Services using Shibboleth and GeoXACML.) One ofthe interesting challenges has been the integration of these standards with the others promoted and used withinthe JISC IE and e-Infrastructure. However, by deploying services using these standards, EDINA will be in aposition for these services to become components of the evolving UK SDI.The Geoservices team at EDINA has undertaken project work to effect Shibboleth-based access management ina web-services environment. This activity was undertaken in cooperation with colleagues from Germany andadvice from Chad La Joie of SWITCH.EDINA began looking at newer technologies including ontologies, knowledge-based infrastructures, and the useof third party APIs provided by the likes of Google and Geonames. Use of third party APIs allowed EDINA toexploit services whose content is global compared to the UK focus of most of the collections hosted byEDINA. As an example, the geoparser, part of GeoCrossWalk, was upgraded to georeference documents withplace references outside of the UK, leveraging the Geonames API for geo-coding.The Go-Geo! portal is the place to discover geospatial information and services for education and research. Go-Geo! enables users to find data, geospatial services and resources, learn about geospatial metadata and accesstools to create and publish standards-compliant geospatial metadata. Launched as a JISC service in November2008, average monthly page requests doubled during the first six months of 2009 to over 21,000. With theappointment of a dedicated portal content coordinator, around 100 monthly additions were made to news,events, conferences, books and other resources. One particular highlight is that Dr. David Wheatley, arecognised pioneer of GIS archaeological applications, has formally incorporated GeoDoc into studentcoursework in the Archaeology Department at the University of Southampton. This has resulted in a privateinstitutional metadata node holding over 250 metadata records. Dr Wheatley said, “The tools provided a usefulway to encourage my students to document their datasets and introduce ideas about interoperability and repurposingspatial data”.Go-Geo! is a critical component in the UK academic SDI and, as a consequence of being interoperable, it canalso be a part of the developing UK SDI. However, to be compliant the metadata needs to be presented to theUK SDI in the correct format. Thus work began on aligning AGMAP with the new government GEMINI2 andEuropean INSPIRE metadata profiles. The Go-Geo! service manager was invited to attend a UK LocationProgramme meeting, part of the UK SDI development activity, to present on lessons learned from running anational geospatial portal.GeoCrossWalk, now re-branded Unlock, the middleware gazetteer and georeferencing infrastructure service, waslaunched as a JISC service in November 2008 and is available for use in the Digimap OS Collection pages. Theprincipal purpose of GeoCrossWalk is to provide a shared terminology service within the JISC InformationEnvironment (IE) that can underpin geographic searching and georeferencing. GeoCrossWalk is designed tomake geographic searching transparent by ‘crosswalking’ these different geographies and is analogous to a sharedterminology service.Another middleware service, the OpenURL Router was developed to address the issue of allowing linkage frombibliographic services to OpenURL resolvers. The OpenURL Router provides a central registry detailingOpenURL resolvers, the institutions to which they belonged, and certain details (UK Federation identifiers, IPaddresses and domain names) that help in identifying members of that institution. This allows referringbibliographic services to address OpenURL links to the correct resolver for each end user, without any priorknowledge of the user or their institution. The OpenURL Router showed continued strong growth in usage over2008/2009, with the number of institutions registered rising from 83 to 94.20

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009The Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) Expert group at EDINA released Discovery serviceversion 1.1, which includes dynamic searching and embedded WAYF capabilities. The group is working on anevolving technical design to allow practical inter-federation working via metadata exchange.The SDSS Federation Support team updates and manages the metadata that underpins the Federation. Themetadata is signed daily to ensure its integrity before being shipped to the Federation operator for distribution toFederation members.Sustain and develop a well-founded UK national academic datacentreProvide effective governance and management of resourcesGovernanceEDINA operates as a HEFCE-related body under the terms of a Funding Agreement signed between HEFCEand the University of Edinburgh. A Management Board that offers specialist advice and guidance has beenestablished under the terms of the Agreement, and it met three times during 2008-2009. The Director ofEDINA reports to the Board. The Chair is chosen in agreement between the University and JISC, and in 2008-2009 Professor Charles Oppenheim agreed to take the Chair. Membership includes representatives from theJISC Secretariat, the user community, the Director of EDINA, and the University of Edinburgh.The Director of EDINA sits on the Information Services (IS) Executive as director of a division of IS and, as anemployee, the Director reports to the Vice Principal and Chief Information Officer of the University; the lattersits on the EDINA Management Board.The EDINA Management Team met fortnightly and is responsible for leadership of activity, finance andresource planning in the data centre. The Business Development Group guides the development of new projectand service activity within EDINA and met fortnightly.EstateThe move to commercial premises in Edinburgh improved the working environment for EDINA staff andprovided additional resources, such as a number of meeting rooms that any member of staff can reserve.Additional accommodation was secured on another floor in the same building in 2008-2009 and some staffmembers moved downstairs in early 2009. EDINA’s office at St Helens College in Newton-le-Willows,Merseyside, closed due to the planned closure of the campus by the College. The 4 members of staff moved tocommercial premises in Birchwood, Warrington, Cheshire in July 2009.It is anticipated that the additional accommodation in Edinburgh and Warrington will address for some time theconstraints previously faced by the organisation due to lack of accommodation for staff.FinancePriority was given in 2008-2009 to improving methods of projecting income, activity and hence staffing andaccommodation requirements. EDINA started work on improving its management accounting systems to makebetter-informed business decisions. In common with many other organisations that receive much of theirfunding from grant money, EDINA faces challenges in being able to react quickly to opportunities when staffmembers are already fully committed in their current work. EDINA’s Strategy and the rolling businessdevelopment plans in each of EDINA’s business areas address the whole of the activity undertaken by the datacentre, and not just its JISC-funded activity. Service Implementation Plans for JISC-funded activity are guided bythese documents. The annual Operational Plan for JISC is based on the Service Implementation Plans.Managing RiskEDINA provides a Risk Register each year to JISC, as part of the requirements of the Funding Agreement andSLD. The Risk Register for 2008-2009 was submitted as required in September 2008. In December 2008,EDINA held two scenario-planning workshops for senior staff. The first addressed financial scenario planning,21

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009and the second IT capability. In addition, in March 2009, the Management Team held an Awayday to assist withstrategic planning.The emergence of the Swine Flu Pandemic in 2008-2009 led to the establishment of a Pandemic Flu workgroupin EDINA. The group produced the following outputs:• A Pandemic Flu procedures document, to capture in one place all the information that staff would needin order to cope with an outbreak of the flu that affected many staff members at once. The document isin six sections:• Individual welfare• Relevant University policies• Relevant health and Government websites• Business travel• Support for working at home• Service continuity procedures• EDINA checked that all staff could work from home and the requirements they have in order to do so.The majority of staff members (including all technical and support staff critical to service continuity)have computers and internet access at home. Others can take home laptops and broadband modemsfrom our pool of mobile equipment.• The group coordinated the production of detailed staff back-up plans for each of our business areas andidentified workarounds in relevant areas. In addition, chains of command in each service area wereidentified.EDINA has dependency on others in Information Services in the University of Edinburgh for keeping hardwareoperational. This aspect is covered by the University’s contingency plans, the same as those that cover vitalUniversity information systems e.g. payroll. EDINA’s services are designed to run unattended 24/7, and plansexist for people to attend wherever events occur.Enhance resource base through technology and staff talentAs a knowledge organisation, staff and their ‘know-how’, expertise and skills remain EDINA’s greatest asset,with the stated view that, “We value staff of talent, skill and motivation as our most important resource”. Staffdevelopment plans for each member of staff were agreed between the staff member and his/her line manager, inline with the annual requirements of the University. EDINA staff participated in training events organised by ISand other groups within the University, as well as external training and development opportunities. A list ofconferences, courses and presentations attended and given in 2008-2009 may be found at the website 11 .EDINA aims to ensure that cross-fertilisation of ideas and ‘know-how’ takes place in the data centre, by meansof regular workshops and meetings in which staff can share their knowledge, and by provision of online toolssuch as the staff intranet. Cross-service workgroups were established in the following areas to share andexchange expertise during 2008-2009:• Repositories and preservation• Mobile internet• Web technology watch• SchoolsIn addition, EDINA aims to share and exchange knowledge with partners in the UK and beyond. This enableslearning from others, as well as contributing to their learning, and builds expertise and capacity. Moreinformation about work done outside EDINA may be found in Section 3.Develop quality technical capabilityEDINA aims to develop and maintain exceptional IT capability, by engaging in ‘technology watch’ and therebyremaining relevant to the community; and by commanding sufficient resources, in terms of human skills,11 http://edina.ac.uk/about/annrep/0809/app6.html22

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009software and hardware, for planning and deployment. EDINA continues to gain from its position inside theUniversity of Edinburgh, and its compatibility with the University’s ICT strategy.There is now agreement with JISC for a recurrent hardware-funding model and funding is now in place for theperiod 2008-2011 from the JISC Capital Programme.In 2008-2009, Sun Fujitsu Sparc 64 servers were purchased to replace the existing Sun Enterprise servers thatwere purchased in 2003. The migration of Digimap to new hardware has largely been completed and migrationof Bibliographic/Multimedia services is ongoing. This hardware replacement has resulted in significantperformance gains and increased resilience. Annual maintenance costs have also been reduced. Further capitalspend to improve resilience is scheduled in the coming year.The University of Edinburgh has established a twin-site configuration for backup, with a second machine roomsituated at a remote site several miles distant. EDINA has bought a fixed number of ‘slots’ in the new SANbasedbackup infrastructure purchased by the University, and the necessity for operator intervention has beenremoved. Future additions to backup capacity can be made when necessary by buying additional ‘slots’ in theUniversity’s infrastructure.JISC have also funded a separate EDINA development environment. This is being used along with Solariscontainer technology to cleanly separate development and service activity. This approach was used successfullyfor recent service development and also for the Digimap annual data load.There has also been a move over the year to adopt virtualisation under VMWare, principally to support non-Solaris operating systems. This has currently been utilised for development and local EDINA projects butshould become a fully supported enterprise environment next year.Over the last year, EDINA has improved resilience by converting and upgrading all of its servers to dual Gigabitconnections configured for automatic failover. An extra Gigabit network switch has also been deployed so thatnetwork connections are dual-pathed.In common with the University’s Information Services group, EDINA is utilising the ITIL IT ServiceManagement framework to ensure that it improves its IT services in line with best practice processes. Severalstaff members have attended University-arranged courses.In 2008-2009, EDINA has been reviewing software systems used across the data centre, with a view to ensuringefficient and effective use of software. EDINA will continue to monitor open source solutions and offeringsfrom commercial software vendors to ensure that the most effective options are deployed in EDINA services.As web services are increasingly being supported by desktop tools, there is an increasing requirement to provideexisting services via a combination of current and new access routes. EDINA plans to provide support forproduction web services. Its hardware and software infrastructure will need to be able to accommodate thecorresponding growth in demand.For internal services, flexibility and ease of maintenance are primary considerations. In 2008-2009, the EDINAhelpdesk/licence maintenance system Helios was re-implemented in a Windows VM environment, replacingCGI scripts by Cold Fusion as the application server, with Microsoft’s SQL-Server replacing Ingres for thedatabase. EDINA also recruited a small-systems support officer, to provide technical support to staff.Ensure EDINA’s long-term sustainabilityEDINA produces three-year rolling Strategies. In 2008-2009, the Strategy for 2009-2012 was made available atthe website 12 and work was undertaken to produce the Strategy for 2010-2013, which was published in Autumn2009. Noting the gap between high-level strategic planning and annual operational planning, EDINA also12 http://edina.ac.uk/about/docs.html23

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009produces three-year rolling business development plans, and the Business Development Plan for 2009-2012 maybe found at the same location on the website.The principal purpose of the business development plan is to work out what EDINA plans to do over theforthcoming three years, identify funding sources for the activities planned, and monitor risks that couldundermine the sustainability of the organisation. Service enhancement activities were notified to JISC in theService Improvement Plans. Some were funded, as described earlier, but many were unfunded and go forwardinto the current year as possibilities for the SIPs for 2010-2011. The Business Development team monitoredfunding opportunities that were notified by JISC and other organisations and some project funding was receivedthat is detailed in Section 3.In 2008-2009, EDINA contributed to the University’s IS Strategy, Annual Plan and Annual Report under theheading of “National and International Engagement”.The Director of EDINA was invited to attend a meeting in May 2009 to discuss the forthcoming JISC Strategyfor 2010-2012. He provided a paper to this meeting, and comment was also made by EDINA on the draft JISCStrategy when it was published. EDINA ensured that its Strategy for 2010-2013 took into account the draftprovisions published to date by JISC for its Strategy.A strategic aim for EDINA is to widen its funding base. The Business Development team keep a careful watchon any opportunities coming along that enable the data centre to do this, especially, but not exclusively, from theEuropean Union and the Research Councils.24

EDINA Annual Review 2008/20094. Corporate Reporta. Management BoardEDINA is a constituent part of the University of Edinburgh. It is a ‘planning unit’ within the InformationServices of the University, with accountability to University Court and reporting via the Vice Principal forKnowledge Management.JISC (through HEFCE) meets a major part of the funding of EDINA, so that it can offer services to the JISC(UK academic) community as a whole. As part of the Funding Agreement that HEFCE has with the University,EDINA is required to have a Management Board, to help articulate the interests of the JISC community, and toact as one communication mechanism between JISC and EDINA.The roles of the Management Board are to:• Support and advise the management of EDINA• Oversee the strategic direction and operation of EDINAThe responsibilities of the Board are to:• Oversee the progress of EDINA, receiving reports on its performance in meeting its obligations underthe Funding Agreement and Service Level Agreement (SLA)• Consider and approve EDINA’s business plans (three-year rolling strategy, operational plans, and budgetsubmissions), as required by the Funding Agreement• Receive and consider any representations that JISC might make under the terms of the FundingAgreement• Oversee and support EDINA in its promotion to the wider communityDuring 2008/2009, Professor Mike Tedd retired from the role as Chair of the Board with thanks and warmappreciation from both EDINA staff and members of the Board. We are grateful to Charles Oppenheim,Professor of Information Science, Loughborough University, for accepting the Chair in his place.The other members of the Board are:• Dr Mark Brown, University Librarian, Southampton University• Professor Jeff Haywood, Vice Principal for Knowledge Management, University of Edinburgh• Norman Wiseman, Head of Services and Outreach, JISC• Lorraine Estelle, Chief Executive Officer, JISC Collections• Fiona Bowtell, Leaning and Teaching Librarian (MCT), Open University (representing the JIBS UserGroup• Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINAOther members of JISC and EDINA attend Board meetings as advisors.Three meetings were held during 2008/2009: in October 2008, March 2009 and July 2009.25

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009b. Management TeamThe EDINA and Data Library Management Team consists of:• Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA• Christine Rees, Team Manager, EDINA Service Delivery: Bibliographic and Multimedia• David Medyckyj-Scott, Team Manager, EDINA Service Delivery: Research and Geodata• Alan Ferguson, Team Manager: EDINA IT Infrastructure• Helen Chisholm, Team Manager: EDINA User Support• Ed Dee, Senior Database Specialist• Robin Rice, Edinburgh University Data Library: Data Librarian• Moira Massey, EDINA Cross-Service Strategy and Planning Manager• Sandy Shaw, Senior Technical Officer• Ingrid Earp, Senior Administrator• Aileen Scott-Johnson, AdministratorThe EDINA Management Team meets fortnightly and is responsible for leadership of activity, finance andresource planning in the data centre. The Business Development Group guides the development of new projectand service activity within EDINA and meets fortnightly.c. Statement of expenditure, 2008-2009This is not available in this version of the document.d. FundingThe national services offered by EDINA during 2008/2009 were funded from several sources. The majoritywere funded by JISC, with funding also provided by ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council), theUniversity of Edinburgh, and by subscription directly from UK HE and FE institutions and other organisations.All online services were made available free, at the point of use, for academic purposes by staff and students atlicensed institutions. Some services, for example NewsFilm Online, Jorum and UKBORDERS, require no fee,while for others an annual institutional subscription is required. For most services, for example EducationImage Gallery and the Digimap Collections, JISC meets the cost of service delivery and collects the subscriptionincome. EDINA charges for some services in order to recover the costs of service delivery, e.g. Land LifeLeisure.In all instances, the University of Edinburgh maintains the necessary IT infrastructure to enable cost-effectivedelivery of service.26

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009e. Staff at EDINA and Data LibraryEDINA’s team structure is as follows:Table 1: EDINA Team StructureUser SupportSupport to users and their support staff, and feedback to theservice delivery teams: promoting the EDINA services; providinga helpdesk and allied activities; learning from, and addressing theneeds of, academic support staff and end users, through highqualitytraining, online documentation and presence at keyconferences and events.Service Delivery(Bibliographic andMultimedia Services;Geo-data Services;Learning and Teaching)IT TechnicalInfrastructureBusiness Developmentand AdministrativeSupportDelivery of online services: developing, implementing andmaintaining effective online data services, including the design andimplementation of customised client software, server functionalityand databases, and ensuring regular data updates.Management of the IT platform: reliable and sufficient support ofonline services; planning and maintaining the underlying softwareand hardware platforms; network connections; effective liaison withthe IT Infrastructure Division (within the University of Edinburgh’sInformation Services); specialist programming support as required.*Business, projects and administration: co-ordination, facilitationand provision of administrative support; seeking out and evaluatingnew opportunities for collection and development; providing anoverview of all project work.*The IT Infrastructure Division provides EDINA with support in the installation, operation and maintenance ofthe hardware and operating system components of multiple SUN servers, the UNIX computing platforms usedto host the EDINA services, and the connection to the Internet.A full list of staff members may be found at the website 13 .13 http://edina.ac.uk/about/personnel.html27

EDINA Annual Review 2008/20095. Forward LookEDINA operates in a continually changing landscape and there are various technology trends, political driversand social factors that have impact on it. Some of these drivers that provide context for our business planninginclude:• the ‘open’ and ‘free’ agendas in software, content and data provision, recognising the ‘informal’ linksbetween creators of content and users;• blurring of boundaries between domains, including the business areas of research, education andknowledge exchange themselves;• the need to offer richer user experiences, arising from the raised level of expectations among end usersgenerated by the GYM (Google, Yahoo and Microsoft) services;• increasing ubiquity of ‘web 2.0’ services, particularly social networking, user generated content,personalisation services, and services offering remixing of data and data transformations;• growth of inter-working between mutually supportive partners with compatible aims, both nationally andinternationally;• growing demand for ‘anytime/anywhere’ computing, with web services, service oriented architectures,repositories and data infrastructures providing the invisible support that responds flexibly to the needs ofthe community.Momentum in providing Open Educational Resources (OER) is gathering pace and services supporting openaccess to journal articles are receiving support from publicly funded sources, including JISC. Globalorganisations providing free geospatial and multimedia services directly affect the expectations that our usershave of our services and us.Increasing demands on institutional finances are leading to a reduction of specialist support staff at a time whenthere is growth in awareness and use of complex data, such as geospatial data; and when students, as fee-payers,are likely to demand more support and richer user experiences. Legal issues, including intellectual propertyrights (IPR), privacy, data protection and provenance affect all working in our business areas.Six technologies stood out in the 2009 Horizon Report 14 as having significant impact on higher education overthe next five years, and therefore in what EDINA must do to add value. They are ‘mobiles’ and ‘cloudcomputing’ (becoming established as mainstream over the coming year); ‘geo-everything’ and ‘the personal web’(within the next two to three years); and ‘semantic-aware applications’ and ‘smart objects’ (four or five years out).‘Geo-enabling’ will become increasingly important, alongside and to support interaction of services with themobile Internet and the personal web, serving to advance science, scholarship and understanding of culturalheritage, support international engagement, and have real world application in the knowledge economy.In common with JISC, other JISC-funded organisations, the institutions we serve, and all public sectororganisations, EDINA is likely to face funding restrictions in the years ahead. We have committed ourselves tostaying relevant to the community, demonstrating the added value that staff and students receive from ourservices, and focusing on the assistance that we can offer institutions to get through the forthcoming difficultyears.14 http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2009/28

EDINA Annual Review 2008/2009Strategic business areasEDINA will continue to operate in the following key strategic business areas, each of which has its own externalcontext.Scholarly communicationsWe will seek to carry out cooperative work to improve ‘discovery to delivery’ to achieve greater consensus andcoherence, providing added value services on content e.g. shared infrastructure such as link resolvers, providingrepositories of open and community-contributed data to support the JISC IE, and further investment in longtermdigital preservation services.GeospatialWe will aim to be active in the academic SDI, with new collections for our communities, extension of services toother sectors, geo-enabling services in the JISC IE, using open datasets to underpin work with internationalcolleagues, delivering services via geo-spatial mobile technologies and providing specialist support services.Learning & TeachingWe will build on the JISC infrastructure for the sharing of L&T materials provided by Jorum, especially in theforthcoming open repository service, bringing our content to the surface in others’ services, user tracking andprofiling, and creating rich reports, which are crucial for sustainability.MultimediaWe will keep an active watching brief on emerging technology and functionality, providing tools upon content,reflecting third party holdings in our portals, using innovative ways to present service-related learning materials,and developing engagement with the user community.Access ManagementWe will seek ways to support collaboration across institutions and allow API/’mash-up’ experiments withlicensed content, including inter-working between service providers; and continuing to provide support for theUK Access Management Federation for Education and Research and for inter-federation developments.29

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