13. International Work

EDINA is increasing its international engagement, both with other organisations having a comparable national remit as EDINA and with multi-national organisations. This is partly because the business of academic research (and teaching) is itself not bounded by national boundaries but also because the UK, and therefore EDINA, has a contribution to make helping to devise services that enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching through the application of ICT. Vendors, of publications and of software, view the UK market within the context of their global strategy, and so must those who contribute raw material deployed in building and operating the digital library.

Topics for international activities include development and use of open interoperability standards, professional development and in some cases the actual delivery of services at the international level. This is most obvious in the fields of spatial infrastructure and that for scholarly publication, including digital preservation, but also extends to that for authentication and authorization and that for sharing open educational resources.

Engagement on the European stage has special strategic significance for EDINA, JISC and the UK academy. We continue to value work with colleagues in North America and are laying the groundwork for doing so with the emergent China through links with the Library of the Academy of Sciences.

Geospatial Activities

The Geo-services team continued to be involved in international activities on a number of fronts, especially in respect of the development and use of open interoperability standards. For example:

• As a partner in the EU e-ContentPlus EuroGeoNames project (see the project section of this annual report);
• The head of the Geo-services team, David Medyckyj-Scott, is an elected member of the Council of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE);
• A member of the Geo-services team, Chris Higgins, co-chairs the Open Geospatial Consortium University Working Group.
• EDINA has been working with Eurogeographics and AGILE to reveal the state of play within each European member state regarding higher education access to national mapping agency data.

In July 2008, EDINA secured a substantial role within the EU e-ContentPlus funded European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (ESDIN) project. This project started in September 2008 and gives EDINA added means to ensure academic sector interests are represented as the European Spatial Data Infrastructure is rolled out using the mechanism of the EU INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) Directive. ESDIN also provides the means for EDINA to engage with national mapping agencies within Europe, something begun during the EuroGeoNames project, but also with global initiatives such as GlobalMap (http://www.iscgm.org/) – EDINA gave a presentation at the Global Mapping Forum 2008 in Tokyo. The academic European persistent geospatial testbed, being developed by AGILE, EuroSDR (effectively the research arms of the National Mapping and Charting Agencies represented at a European level) and OGC will continue to be a focus of activity for EDINA, with EDINA having specific involvement in aspects of the testbed relating to service security. One activity leads to another and it is reasonable to expect further opportunities for useful, funded international activity will arise. An example of this is that, as a result of the e-Framework meeting in Canberra, EDINA is putting together, with JISC's support, a joint e-Framework project with an organisation in New Zealand.

Bibliographic Activity

SUNCAT & PEPRS

Active participation in the ISSN Network continued with attendance at two meetings in Paris and Tunisia during 2008/2009. The ISSN is a partner in the new PEPRS project.

There was also contact with other national union catalogues of serials, especially across Europe. A presentation of PEPRS was made at the 24th Annual Conference of NASIG (North American Serials Interest Group), June 2009 in a strategy session in order to seek feedback on project plans from a wider international community. A PEPRS briefing was also given at an ISSN Directors meeting.

Data Preservation

EDINA staff collaborated with Digital Curation Centre and Information Services colleagues to organise the first 'Repository Fringe' un-conference at the University of Edinburgh during the Summer of 2008, with international speakers and attendees. This was followed up in July 2009 with 'Beyond the Repository Fringe', another successful event attended by repository managers and developers alike, with a new format and a code challenge.

The DISC-UK DataShare project led by EDINA involved a consortium of repository managers and data librarians from the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford, and Southampton. The project was completed in July 2009, having produced a number of internationally recognised deliverables in addition to the planned institutional repository enhancements. These included briefing papers, a Dublin Core metadata application profile for datasets, institutional data audits, peer-reviewed articles, posters and talks at international conferences.

The project manager, Robin Rice, went on a study tour of Australian and New Zealand institutions engaged in developing services and policies for data management and recorded her impressions on the DataShare project blog. She was invited to lead seminars at both the University of Sydney and Monash University in Melbourne – a podcast of the latter has been posted. The final project deliverable, "Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories: A Guide," was used by the project team to conduct two successful training events; 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.

Open Access

EDINA has been actively participating in international activity in the open access arena including:

Meetings

Peter Burnhill led the 'Repository Handshake' session at the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop in Amsterdam, March 2009: He has also continued to be involved with the group taking this strand of activity forward and attended the OAI Conference in Geneva in June 2009.

Access Management

The adoption of SAML as a protocol and Shibboleth as the software foundation by an increasing number of international access management federations (including the UK federation) mandated the development of strong links between EDINA and the international access management community. Members of the EDINA Expert Group have been involved at the heart of this evolving technology. EDINA staff were involved with the development of the SAML2 protocol and have contributed to the Shibboleth code base. This involvement required close cooperation with the internationally based Internet2 Shibboleth development team which met regularly in the US.

As well as contributing Shibboleth core code, Rod Widdowson has been responsible for the development of the IdP Quick Installer and the SAML2 Discovery Service (formally called the WAYF). Both of these applications reside on the Shibboleth distribution site, available for international use.

Ian Young and Chad La Joie, SWITCH (a core Shibboleth developer) have developed a protocol and a technical architecture for the aggregation and distribution of federation metadata to facilitate inter-federation working. It is expected that his work, which has been reviewed by Shibboleth experts from the US and a number of European federations will lead to the building of a demonstrator metadata Aggregation Engine early in 2010.

Further project work has been undertaken by the Geo team at EDINA to effect Shibboleth-based access management in a web-services environment. This activity was undertaken in cooperation with colleagues for Germany and advice from Chad La Joie of SWITCH.