EDINA Annual Report for 1997/98

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1. EDINA

1.1 Mission statement

1.2 Aims

1.3 Objectives

2. The EDINA national data services

3. Service availability

4. Service funding

5. Service strategy

5.1 User Support

5.2 Service Delivery and Technical Infrastructure

5.3 Specialist support

5.4 Information management

5.5 Technology strategy

6. Help to users - documentation and help facilities

6.1 Documentation

6.2 Help facilities

7. Relationship with users

7.1 Training and tutorials

7.2 User Relationships, Interest Groups and User Feedback

8. Promotion and marketing

9. User registration and authentication

10. Usage statistics

11. Highlights of events and activities

12. Publications, papers and exhibitions

13. International work

13.1 CASA

13.2 IASSIST

14. EDINA Steering Committee

15. Summary of accounts

16. Future plans

APPENDIX 1 - Data services

APPENDIX 2 - Number of Log-ins August 1997 to July 1998 for BIOSIS, PCI, Palmers and Art Abstracts

APPENDIX 3 - Registered Institutions

APPENDIX 4 - Summary of expenditure, 1997/98

APPENDIX 5 - Staff

APPENDIX 6 - Conferences, Courses and Presentations

APPENDIX 7 - EDINA web page

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1. EDINA

1.1 Mission statement

As a JISC-designated national datacentre, EDINA seeks through the provision of specialist data services to enhance the productivity of research, learning and teaching in UK higher education.

1.2 Aims

0. To provide staff and students with access to key information resources, as part of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER).
1. To ensure that EDINA is a well-regarded and cost-effective University-based national datacentre, with appropriate resources for support, collaborative interworking and the required technical interoperability with other service providers.

1.3 Objectives

Collection development: Information, Content and Services

To develop the EDINA portfolio of dataset services,

• by including full text and a varied range of research data
• by pro-active business development, and partnership with data creators, publishers and other service providers

To sustain leadership in the provision of bibliographic and digital map data

To offer a significant part of the DNER, by achieving critical mass and market presence

Service development: Accessibility, Outreach and Interoperability

To increase the overall usability and relevance of EDINA services, by

• listening to and assisting scholars and their support staff

To widen access to online services, by

• increasing awareness of EDINA services among potential subscribers and end-users
• using only common facilities in web pages (e.g. 'no-frames'), and following design guidelines for the disabled
• providing a choice of views (access points) onto the information landscape
• making authentication/registration straightforward
• encouraging an environment where intellectual property rights restrictions are minimised

To continue to move to an open technology - service environment, by

• assisting users to progress from resource discovery to access
• collaborating with the MOving to the Distributed Environment for Library Services (MODELS) Implementation Architecture (MIA) adopted for the DNER
• integrating bibliographic information and research data sets

Datacentre development: Staff and Resources

To retain and develop a flexible and sustainable complement of able staff

To sustain an effective blend of service-orientation and development capability

To develop and maintain an exceptional IT infrastructure at the University of Edinburgh

To command sufficient understanding and financial resources for planning and deployment within the information service economy for higher education.

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2. The EDINA national data services

During 1997/98 EDINA provided the following national services:

• EDINA BIOSIS
• EDINA PCI
• EDINA Palmer's
• EDINA Art Abstracts
• SALSER
• OS Strategi^TM
• UKBORDERS

A Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA) Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management Database (ESPMD) service became available through EDINA at the end of the reporting period.

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3. Service availability

EDINA aims to offer a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week service. Information on planned breaks of service is broadcast to users in advance.

The EDINA Helpdesk is staffed during normal office hours, Monday to Friday. Times during which the Helpdesk is not staffed, such as public holidays, are advertised in advance. It is staffed in a rota system, mainly by the EDINA User Support Team, although duty officers are also drawn from a wider pool within EDINA specifically trained for that purpose. This ensures the greatest possible contingency backup.

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4. Service funding

The national services included as part of EDINA are funded from several sources, including the University of Edinburgh, and by subscription from UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). A list of subscribing institutions is set out in Appendix 3.

The provision of services for EDINA BIOSIS, EDINA PCI, EDINA Palmer's and EDINA Art Abstracts is funded by JISC; UKBORDERS is funded jointly by ESRC and JISC; SALSER has been funded by contributions from the participating SCURL libraries, following set-up funding from the Scottish Library and Information Committee and the Carnegie Trust. OS Strategi^TM and CSA ESPMD are funded by direct subscription. These online services are available free at the point of use for UK academic purposes.

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5. Service strategy

All national services supported by EDINA have been grouped within the scope of the Data Library structure of management and operation. The functions necessary for operating the data services offered through EDINA are divided into four: User Support, Service Delivery, Technical Infrastructure and Specialist Support.

5.1 User Support

The User Support Team is responsible for outreach and promotion, provision of Helpdesk, training and other User Support activities. It provides support to users with enquiries, through effective liaison with academic support staff (mainly librarians) in the HEIs, through documentation and training, and through an online Helpdesk. It also provides a bridge between end-users, their representatives and Data Vendors and provides feedback to the Service Delivery Team. Together with staff from the other national datacentres, they provide a 'public face' to the UK electronic library.

5.2 Service Delivery and Technical Infrastructure

The Service Delivery Team is responsible for ensuring that reliable and user-friendly access is provided to the datasets. This includes the design and implementation of database schema and user interfaces, and updating policy and practice. This Team works closely with the Infrastructure Team, which is responsible for ensuring that the underlying software and hardware platforms work well, ensuring effective liaison with the Facilities Management Division, and also providing specialist programming support as required.

The Facilities Management Division of EUCS provide EDINA with support in the installation, operation and maintenance of the hardware and operating system components of pentlands.ed and pentlands2.ed, the UNIX computing platforms used to host the service, and the connection to the Internet. EUCS manages and operates the largest University-based computing service in the UK and has supported national and regional services since the late 1960s. Edinburgh continues to be a centre of computing and networking excellence, with connections to all major academic networks, including SuperJANET.

5.3 Specialist support

EDINA services cover a range of academic disciplines resulting in a heterogeneous userbase and target audiences with different user requirements. Each service is assigned a Service Co-ordinator, charged with ensuring the 'long term health' of that service and carrying out a monitoring role on service performance. However, EDINA cannot always have staff with specialist knowledge in all subjects covered by its databases: such specialist support is therefore sought from appropriate experts, such as the data vendors, relevant University departments and such as the subject-based Information Gateways (e.g. Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), Organising Medical Networked Information (OMNI). During the past two years we have established good working relationships with the subject-based data organisations, such as the Arts & Humanities Data Service (AHDS), and with other non-JISC organisations in the electronic library, such as the Computing in Teaching Initiatives (CTIs).

5.4 Information management

EDINA bibliographic and research data services and associated Data Library activities are organised into subject-based 'faculties':

• Agriculture, Environmental & Life Sciences
• Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
• Engineering, Informatics & Physical Sciences

In order to aid navigation of resources, the EDINA services are also categorised by type:

• bibliographic services, including full text
• geographic reference data and facilities
• research datasets

It is also part EDINA's strategy to provide alternative views of the Information Landscape, for example, the data of special relevance to Scotland.

5.5 Technology strategy

The EDINA national services funded by JISC are delivered by two Sun Enterprise UltraSPARC 4000 servers, named pentlands.ed and pentlands2.ed. These machines are modular and upgradable to system maxima of 14 CPUs, 14 Gb memory and 6Tb of disk. Currently, each machine is identically configured with 4 x 167 MHz CPUs and multiple dual-attached SUN SPARCstorage arrays. Currently there are 230 Gb of disk attached to these machines. The majority of service databases are protected by RAID technology. Each machine currently has 1Gb of memory. Should either machine suffer a serious failure, services could be moved to the other.

The principal software used for service delivery are four commercially-proven products: BASIS, OCLC SiteSearch, ARC/INFO and Ingres. The first two software products have specialist use as database management systems for the bibliographic datasets. BASIS effectively has relational and transactional functionality and was also used to implement a user registration database; OCLC SiteSearch is particularly suited for use within the distributed environment, supporting WWW desktop browser access and Z39.50 v3 interoperability. ARC/INFO is used for geographic information systems (GIS) applications. Ingres is a relational database management system.

Apache is used as the World Wide Web Server, Perl is used extensively for data processing and in user interfaces, and there is increasing use of Java.

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6. Help to users - documentation and help facilities

EDINA's policy on provision of documentation and help facilities are outlined in the EDINA's Service Level Definition, which is available from the JISC''s Monitoring and Advisory Unit (MAU).

6.1 Documentation

During 1997/98, the EDINA Web site underwent a major revision, with a view to improve accessibility: specifically, to help users with visual impairments, and in general to help users navigate through the information and to identify the service most relevant to them. In addition it was our aim to offer attractive Web pages without excluding those with relatively low-tech equipment (see section 11 for further discussion). On the new Web pages, released in July 1998, EDINA services are organised into subject-based 'faculties' and data types. Links to other information services in the UK Electronic Library are also offered, which alert users to the existence of other services and facilities of relevance.

January 1998 saw the launch of a new service, Art Abstracts, the first EDINA service to be offered with a Web interface from the start. Like all EDINA services this comes with full, context-specific online help facilities. Consultation with the user community (through our site representatives, field testers and the JIBS User Group) indicated that despite the user friendly interface there was still a demand for printed user documentation. As a result we produced a Quick Reference Card in the familiar EDINA style. This was complemented by A3 posters and A5 flyers to help raise awareness of the service. These were sent for distribution to the CTI Art and Design as well as to subscribing sites.

Two new Reference Cards were also produced for the UKBORDERS service, which underwent significant improvements at the beginning of 1998. One of these cards guides users through the retrieval of contemporary boundary data, the other offers help with historical boundary data, which was added to the database in parallel with the interface developments.

In August 1997 online tutorials for BIOSIS, Palmer's Index to the Times and PCI were published on the Web in HTML format, and as Powerpoint files which can be downloaded and used as training aids by site representatives and other local User Support staff. Tutorials for Art Abstracts were added shortly after the launch of the service.

Our range of flyers and posters, designed to raise awareness of the EDINA services, were completely redesigned. EDINA now offers a much more attractive range of A5 flyers and A3 posters for each service, colour coded by discipline to reflect EDINA's new faculty approach to presenting its services. On the Web and in printed promotional material, each service is identified by an image which is indicative of the database contents.

All the changes described here were announced in EDINA's quarterly newsletter, Newsline, which continues to play a major role in keeping academic support staff and others with an interest in our services abreast of developments at EDINA.

6.2 Help facilities

In addition to our normal Helpdesk activities, aimed at end-users and local User Support staff, EDINA is involved in a pilot project led by the Department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. This offers an interactive help-desk service to BIOSIS users and investigates how such a resource is used by the academic community. This remote referencing service was launched in April 1998 and allows users to make on-line contact with a reference librarian or the EDINA Helpdesk whilst performing a literature search on BIOSIS. Without having to leave their computer, users can chat directly to an expert through a text window on their browser. They can also share their search sessions with the expert to demonstrate where they are having difficulties.

Much Helpdesk and related activity during the year arose from the move to use of ATHENS for registration and authentication. We provided information on the dedicated ATHENS mailbase list, on our Web site and through Newsline to help site representatives with the transition.

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7. Relationship with users

7.1 Training and tutorials

During the reporting period, EDINA offered over 20 workshops and seminars covering its bibliographic services at various levels.

We began the academic year 1997/98 with two workshops at Durham University in October 1997. They were open to support staff from Durham and other universities and covered BIOSIS, and PCI & Palmer's Index respectively. Both sessions were run jointly with a representative from the relevant data vendor. In January 1998 a session was held at Glasgow Caledonian University as part of an internal library staff awareness programme.

This was followed by an intensive programme of site visits across the UK between May and July 1998. 16 institutions responded to our offer of free site visits during the summer term. The scheme was experimental with the aim of providing presentations customised to the needs of individual institutions. The events were open to local User Support staff or end-users, depending on the site representative's preferences. They covered database contents and interface use, and allowed plenty of time for questions. The general format was for a short presentation followed by hands-on sessions for which user guides and exercises were distributed. The workshops were successful and well attended by library staff and academics from the host institutions. However, the programme was very resource intensive and may not be repeated in this form.

As well as the dedicated EDINA workshops, a number of EDINA presentations and hands-on sessions were included as part of training events organised by other organisations in the UK electronic library, including Netskills, various subject gateways and the CTIs. Such collaborative seminars fit well into EDINA's policy of taking a more subject based approach to training and of reaching end-users in departments. The UKBORDERS training programme continued with the remit to develop understanding of the uses to which digitised boundary data may be put by users. We presented a number of lectures, tutorial and workshops, jointly with MIDAS and other relevant organisations.

7.2 User Relationships, Interest Groups and User Feedback

We continued to work with the JIBS User Group as an appropriate forum for input from users of EDINA bibliographic services. The Group's mailbase list 'lis-jibs-users' was used in addition to EDINA's own list 'edina-all' to keep users informed of service news. During 1997/98, EDINA staff attended every meeting of the JIBS User Group, and presented reports when invited to do so. In June1998, we gave a presentation on EDINA's vision of interoperability in the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) to a special open JIBS meeting in Milton Keynes.

UKBORDERS users received information via the 'edina-ukb' mailbase list and continued to be represented through the ESRC Census Advisory Committee which is comprised of a number of forums and groups:

• UK 2001 Census Planning Committees
• Academic Advisory Group
• Working Group on Output & Geography
• Dissemination Special Interest Group
• Scottish 2001 Census Planning Committees
• Census Advisory Committee
• Geographical Products User Group

UKBORDERS is represented on the management committee of the ESRC-funded Historical GIS Project at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London.

We consulted with User Support staff and other representatives of the user community on issues of interface development, for the launch of Art Abstracts and for the upgrade of the UKBORDERS Telnet interface. The same approach was used towards the end of the reporting period for the development of a Web interface to UKBORDERS (released in September 1998). In all cases we were successful in including a significant number of end-users in the external field-testing process prior to the release of the service. In the case of Art Abstracts, the Computers in Teaching Initiative for Art and Design (CTIAD), Visual Arts and Design (VADS) and Performing Arts Dataservice (PADS) were instrumental in the recruitment of field-testers.

In January a user needs workshop was hosted at the University of Warwick by AHDS, as part of a wider study of user needs in the Arts and Humanities. This gave us the opportunity to learn more about support requirements in those fields. This was followed up in the Spring by a similar workshop at Edinburgh. Hosted by VADS, this looked at the specific needs of the Art and Design Community. EDINA contributed to this workshop not only as a participant but also through a presentation on bibliographic resources for the Art community and issues of User Support in this area.

In September a 5 day workshop on GIS for historians was given at the University of Essex in conjunction with the History Data Service (HDS) and the Association for History and Computing.

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8. Promotion and marketing

Following the marketing and promotional efforts of our first two years as a JISC national datacentre, EDINA has become fully established as a reliable online service provider among decision makers in the university library community.

We continued our efforts to market our data services to the academic staff and students in the subscribing institutions. As in the previous year, we did this by assisting site representatives and other support staff in their local promotional activity, by providing copies of posters flyers and other informative material, either free or on a cost-recovery basis. We also worked with organisations which aim their activities directly at end-users, such as Netskills, the Subject Gateways (e.g. Social Science Information Gateway, (SOSIG), Art, Design, Architecture & Media information gateway, (ADAM) AHDS, and the CTIs. We also continued our co-operation with the data vendors in promoting our services.

A specific challenge during 1997/98 was the promotion of the new Art Abstracts service. This service is aimed at a user community with mixed or little experience of online resources, often in small institutions with low budgets. The negotiations to complete the CHEST Agreement for Art Abstracts coincided with the publication of the report of the JISC's Working Group on Charging, and we successfully lobbied for the implementation of the group's recommendations on differential charging for Art Abstracts. We also became members of the Pavilion Group, an informal collective of projects and initiatives whose broad aims are to support and enhance teaching and learning in art and design in Higher Education through the application of information technology.

In addition to the co-operative events described earlier, highlights in EDINA's calendar included:

• the annual Libtech conference and exhibition (Hatfield, September 1997: exhibition stand plus active involvement in three seminars)
• the IRISS conference (Bristol, April 1998: exhibition stand, paper and workshop)
• Teaching and Learning in Scottish Metropolitan Area Networks, (TALiSMAN) seminar on Networked Information Resources on Teaching and Learning
• Census Data workshop to promote and give training for the UKBORDERS service.

Flyers and posters were distributed at a number of other events

The following means were used to promote EDINA services and to keep users informed of developments:

• The EDINA Web server (http://edina.ed.ac.uk)
• Newsline, EDINA's quarterly newsletter, distributed in print to all site representatives and available on the EDINA Webserver
• Articles in other newsletters and publications
• EDINA's mailbase lists: edina-all@mailbase.ac.uk, edina-sitereps@mailbase.ac.uk, edina-ukb@mailbase.ac.uk
• JIBS user group mailbase list: lis-jibs-user@mailbase.ac.uk
• Other mailbase lists as appropriate
• Information stands and product presentations at conferences and meetings
• Presentations at other awareness-raising events, e.g. Netskills and SOSIG workshops

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9. User registration and authentication

From its inception EDINA operated its own registration and authentication system, based on individual user IDs and passwords. During 1996/97, following national agreement, EDINA made preparations to move to use of ATHENS, the national registration and authentication system developed by NISS. During 1997/98 the transfer of EDINA's userbase to ATHENS was undertaken. This transfer was not complete by the end of the reporting period, partly because of resistance to change and partly through delays in the wider acceptance of ATHENS outside EDINA's control. However, it is anticipated that all of EDINA's users of bibliographic services will have switched to ATHENS shortly after the start of the 1998/99 academic session.

Use of ATHENS for UKBORDERS will not be implemented until further developments of ATHENS have been made.

Throughout this lengthy and often difficult process, users and site representatives have been assisted through a programme of support and regular information updates. This will continue until all users are authenticated through ATHENS. In addition, the EDINA Helpdesk provides advice and support for registration under ATHENS, forwarding enquiries to NISS where appropriate.

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10. Usage statistics

The numbers of institutions subscribing to each service in 1997/98 were:

BIOSIS Preview	39
PCI	62
UKBORDERS	111
Palmer's Index	60
Art Abstracts	10

Log-in statistics are given in Appendix 2. (Log-in figures for the new ESPMD service were not available.)

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11. Highlights of events and activities

During 1997/98, we have been developing a strategy for accessibility. This requires us to consider the needs of the full range of users, including those with legacy terminals and browsers, inexperienced users and those with disabilities. In preparation for the 1998/99 academic session, EDINA reorganised and redesigned its Web site. Design aims include: simplicity; a 'no-frames' policy; following design guidelines for access by the disabled; and - for Web-based database services - offering user-level profile options. We aim to present our services to users in a way that is relevant to them, whether they are coming from the faculty/discipline approach or are looking for a particular type of data or resource.

The purpose of the 'faculty' representation is to allow the end user (staff or student) to view the EDINA services within the perspective of a larger 'information landscape'. Rather than a 'one stop' shop approach, this alerts the (actual or prospective) user of the EDINA national services, through hot-link pointers, to the existence of other services and facilities of relevance. These include other JISC-sponsored services and the subject-based resource discovery facilities, as well as other related services.

Our strategy is to encourage traffic through the 'arcade' offered on these Web pages with the intention of promoting knowledge, and thereby use, of the EDINA services. This is also a much more sensible basis on which to investigate interworking with other agencies. Further, it motivates interoperability, as users of bibliographic information, such PCI or Art Abstracts, wish to use an acquired bibliographic reference to link with services offering the information object itself, whether the full text of a journal article, a particular image or a research dataset.

In order to aid navigation of resources, the EDINA services are also categorised by type:

• bibliographic services including full text
• geographic reference data and facilities
• research datasets

Also, it is part of the strategy for EDINA that it has a remit to provide services for data of special relevance to Scotland: research data, bibliographic data and geographic data. Thus, another view of the Information Landscape is offered to the user:

• the land and people of Scotland.

The faculty group approach is reviewed below:

Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences

The Web page for the Arts, Humanities and the Social Sciences shows the bibliographic, research and geographic datasets offered as part of the EDINA national services. This is based around the PCI and Art Abstract databases but also includes UKBORDERS which is used for geodemographic-related research and teaching. The relevant JISC-sponsored services in this area are The Data Archive and the AHDS data services and the subject-based resource discovery facilities are ADAM and SOSIG. Interoperability is obviously of interest to users of Art Abstracts who are likely to wish to link to the information object, e.g. an image, video clip, etc.

Agriculture, Environmental and the Life Sciences

The bibliographic data sets offered in the Agriculture, Environment & Life Sciences are based around BIOSIS Previews, the premier database for the life sciences. We identified a gap in the DNER provision, Agriculture and the Environment, one in which the Data Library has some experience as a provider. We have therefore added CSA, a database offered commercially. Both are offered to HEIs by direct subscription, in which there is an agreement to share revenue with the database vendor. Also included in the list, as research data sets, are Agricultural Census data and data from the British Survey of Fertiliser Practice. The Data Library has several years of first-hand experience in both datasets. UKBORDERS is listed, as would be the OS digital map data; both databases have multi-disciplinary appeal across the 'faculties'.

At present there is no relevant subject-based resource discovery facility for this faculty, except, OMNI which acts for the medical and health sciences. Indeed there is little offered for the agricultural colleges. EDINA is currently negotiating to offer a further data set for this subject area, and would wish to assist in the creation of a discovery facility for Agriculture, Land-Use and the Environment. Over past years, the Data Library has established good relationships with several relevant organisations in the research and teaching community, including MAFF.

Engineering, Informatics and the Physical Sciences

The opportunity to provide a service for INSPEC and to host Ei Compendex came just outside of the reporting period. This led to the introduction of a further faculty. A major feature in this area is the collaboration between EDINA and EEVL, the 'Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library', which is the relevant subject-based resource discovery facility for Engineering.

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12. Publications, papers and exhibitions

A list is given in Appendix 6.

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13. International work

13.1 CASA

The Data Library is a partner, as manager of SALSER, in CASA (Co-operative Action on Serials and Articles), a three-year two-phase EU Telematics and Libraries Programme project led by the University of Bologna. This project began in January 1997; it is based around the World Register of Serials maintained by the ISSN International Centre in Paris. CASA is designed to provide the users of libraries and information professionals with access to better information about journals and other periodicals. The Data Library's role has been to identify appropriate standards and routing, such as the use of Z39.50 to allow distributed access, and to allow article-level bibliographic descriptions to be linked with information on 'who holds what'.

13.2 IASSIST

For many years Data Library staff have been active members of the International Association of Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST), 'an international organisation of individuals who are engaged in the acquisition, processing, maintenance and distribution of machine-readable text and/or numeric social science data'. The membership of IASSIST, which was founded some 20 years ago, includes information system specialists, database librarians or administrators, archivists, researchers, programmers and managers. Peter Burnhill is currently IASSIST President, and was previously its Vice President and European Secretary, Alison Bayley is the Assistant Treasurer. IASSIST holds an annual conference in the USA or Canada for 3 years out of 4, and in Europe in the 4th year. The Data Library hosted the conference in Edinburgh in 1993. The 1998 conference was held at Yale University, USA. The 1999 conference will be held at Toronto, Canada.

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14. EDINA Steering Committee

This was convened under the chairmanship of John Darby during 1997/98. It was decided that its members would serve for an initial period of eighteen months only. This is for several reasons. First, EDINA needed specialist advice and guidance during the early period of its designation and operation as a national datacentre, given the earlier establishment of other datacentres and the emerging demands of the UK electronic library. Second, the role of the steering committee as a reporting mechanism between the data centre and JISC has changed. It is sensible to review membership in this light.

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15. Summary of accounts

A statement of expenditure for 1997/98 is given in Appendix 4.

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16. Future plans

EDINA intends to add to its portfolio of bibliographic datasets, within defined specialist areas. It will also enhance usability, recognising that staff and students wish to move along the (MODELS) discover -> locate -> request-> access chain, using references found within bibliographic datasets to link to services on the information objects described: full text of journal articles, images, research datasets, etc. We intend to integrate bibliographic information and research data sets within a coherent framework of structured metadata.

We intend to widen access by actively supporting the efforts of subject gateways. We will also work with designers of university and library Web pages, and assist them in their task of presenting an HEI-specific view of the information landscape offered by the DNER.

By building on experience with SALSER and project work on identifiers (with CASA, the ISSN International Centre and EDItEUR), we seek a strategic national role in the provision of search and locate services for serials and articles (SALSA).

A major challenge for EDINA is to establish its role as a host for full text services. This requires active discussions about the relation between EDINA and NSLI, the National Site Licensing Initiative. The timing of the launch of EDINA (January 1996) meant that there was no opportunity for development funding from the eLib Programme for full-text services; nor could this have been our first priority. However, we have carried out preliminary 'proof of concept' work for the delivery of Elsevier electronic journals using SiteSearch. Subject to CEI approval, we will seek to implement such a service.

A second major challenge for EDINA is to expand its research data and geographic data services. There is increasing demand for access to digital research data and digital map data. Through its links with the Data Library, EDINA has built up an extensive understanding of the needs and support requirements of users with regard to research data. A good working relationship has been developed between EDINA/Data Library and a variety of research data providers (e.g. the Office for National Statistics, MAFF, SOAEFD, GRO(S), the EDLINE consortium and the Ordnance Survey), which we plan to build upon.

EDINA will be bidding to run the national service providing access to Ordnance Survey data, should the JISC decide to support such a service. We also plan to offer the Agricultural Census database and data from the British Survey of Fertiliser Practice as part of the EDINA national services.

In the longer term we would wish to make our services interoperate with other research data services in the HE community, as well as with the other electronic library resources making up the DNER. Distributed access is the key. Data should stay with the owner/holder and be accessed remotely, processed and integrated for the end user via distributed DBMS. However, because the database technology adopted by, for example, GIS vendors - OO, and RDBMS such as Oracle - is different from that being used within the DNER (e.g. BASIS), interoperability between electronic library resources and research data services will be restricted. A technological framework will need to be developed to access and integrate information from all the available sources in a timely and useful fashion.

During 1998/99 we intend to introduce a service based on Agdex, a database of articles published in the farming press, created and maintained by the Scottish Agricultural College (SAC).

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APPENDIX 1 - Data services

Bibliographic data

EDINA BIOSIS
On-line access to the BIOSIS Previews database covering data from 1985 onwards. BIOSIS Previews is the electronic version of Biological Abstracts (BA), the largest printed reference publication for life sciences information; and Biological Abstracts/RRM (Reports, Reviews, Meetings), the companion printed reference to books, meetings and research reviews.

EDINA Art Abstracts
On-line access to the Art Abstracts database, which contains bibliographic references and abstracts of articles from 280 periodicals - journals, yearbooks and museum bulletins - published in English and other major languages, from 1984 to the present. Art Abstracts is published by H.W. Wilson.

EDINA PCI On-line access to the Periodicals Contents Index (PCI) for the periodical literature in their academic disciplines. It contains information from the tables of contents of thousands of English and
other European language journals, from their date of issue to 1990. PCI is published by Chadwyck-Healey.

EDINA Palmer's Index to The Times
On-line access to the Palmer's Index to the Times, the only index to articles in the Times for every issue from October 1790 to December 1905 (After which the indexing of the Times was continued as The Official Index of the Times). Palmer's is published by Chadwyck-Healey.

EDINA SALSER
On-line access to the Scottish Academic Libraries Serials, SALSER, a World Wide Web-based virtual union catalogue of the serials holdings of all 13 Scottish universities, the municipal research libraries of Edinburgh and Glasgow, numerous smaller Scottish research libraries and the National Library of Scotland. The purpose of SALSER is to facilitate access to information on serials and thereby ensure their fuller and more effective use by students and researchers in Scotland.

ESPMD
On-line access to the Environmental Sciences & Pollution Management Database, which provides abstracts and references to the literature covering all areas of air, land, water, and noise pollution as well as bacteriology, ecology, toxicology, risk assessment, environmental engineering, environmental biotechnology, waste management, and water resources. ESPMD is published by Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.

Geographical information systems

EDINA UKBORDERS
UKBORDERS, the UK Boundary Outline and Reference Database for Education and Research Study, offers the UK higher education community access to the most comprehensive database of UK digitised boundaries available. The boundary data on offer include coverages relating to population census, administrative, electoral and postal areas. Census areas include, for 1981, Ward (England & Wales) and Postcode Sector (Scotland); while, for 1991, access is provided to boundaries measured at a finer resolution: about 150,000 Census EDs/OAs, over 130,000 unit postcodes (Scotland) and a variety of higher-order boundaries constructed from these basic units, including Wards (England & Wales) and Postcode Sectors (Scotland). UKBORDERS also hosts a large and growing number of historical boundary data relating to the 19th and 20th centuries, including Registration Districts (England & Wales) and Civil Parishes (Scotland) and the higher order boundaries for which these can be used as building blocks.

OS Strategi^TM
Off-line access to OS Strategi^TM, the digital representation of the Ordnance Survey's Travelmaster® map series. It is a geometrically structured 1:250 000 scale vector database that defines real world geographic entities (objects) as point and line features.

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APPENDIX 2 - Number of Log-ins August 1997 to July 1998 for BIOSIS, PCI, Palmers and Art Abstracts

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APPENDIX 3 - Registered Institutions

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APPENDIX 4 - Summary of expenditure, 1997/98

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APPENDIX 5 - Staff

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APPENDIX 6 - Conferences, Courses and Presentations

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APPENDIX 7 - EDINA web page

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