6. Help to Users: Documentation and Help Facilities

EDINA's policy on provision of documentation and help facilities is as outlined in our Service Level Definition available from JISC’s Monitoring Unit (MU).

6.1 Documentation and Web Presence

The EDINA website continued to act as the main access point for users of our projects and services. The EDINA Home page was refreshed, as were the look and feel of the underlying pages. The site was re-launched in February 2008 with an expanded Help & Support area as well as a dedicated section for Library and Support staff.

Publicity material in the form of the well-established EDINA A5 flyers and A3 posters was produced and distributed. As with our existing services, new services were documented by means of Quick Reference Guides, and with support material on the EDINA website. In addition, individual posters were produced for exhibitions and to supplement the standard range of materials.

EDINA continued to provide service demonstrations for new services and interface updates. The service demonstrations were produced using Camtasia in a wide range of formats. In addition the initial steps were taken to produce animations for services and projects.

EDINA's quarterly newsletter Newsline continued to play an important role in helping academic support staff and others with an interest in our services to keep abreast of developments at EDINA.

6.2 Help Facilities

The EDINA Helpdesk acted as the primary point of contact for all enquiries concerning EDINA services and responded to enquiries from both end-users and support staff. It also had a role, on a cost-recovery basis, in support of the Digital Curation Centre. Helpdesk staff categorised queries and entered them into a call-logging system, noting those to be included as an intrinsic part of our user feedback system for the purpose of future developments. Queries were mostly resolved directly by the Helpdesk staff or referred to experts inside and outside of EDINA as appropriate.

Training

The training courses or workshops run in 2007/2008 are detailed in the table below:

Table 2: Training courses

Course Name	No. of courses run	No of Attendees
		Total	HE	FE
Film & Sound Online	5	43	20	23
Education Image Gallery	5	43	20	23
Digimap	3	31	25	6
MasterMap (site representatives)	2	21	21	0
MasterMap (Users)	2	32	32	0

User Feedback on Training

Feedback from training course evaluation forms was positive, with the majority of participants rating their trainers' knowledge and presentation and course materials as very good. The content and delivery of courses was regularly reviewed and updated to reflect the learning objectives of participants.

In addition to course evaluation forms, Digimap site representatives were offered the opportunity to participate in a survey of training needs at the end of academic year 2007-08. Thirty-two responses were received, the content of which has been used to inform what is included in Digimap training courses for 2008-09.