3. Meeting our goals

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In this section:

• Manage and present a portfolio of data services and projects relevant to need
  • Provide quality assured services for client communities
  • Enhance content and collection development
  • Present a coherent and useful service portfolio
  • Gain understanding by undertaking research into innovative services and enhancements
• Increase usefulness and relevance of EDINA services and project activity
  • Provide effective outreach and support services
  • Enhance accessibility of services
  • Gain leverage from inter-working, in UK and internationally
  • Develop interoperable services and infrastructure
• Sustain and develop a well-founded UK national academic data centre
  • Provide effective governance and management of resources
  • Enhance resource base through technology and staff talent
  • Develop quality technical capability
  • Ensure EDINA's long-term sustainability

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This section of the Annual Review describes what EDINA has done in 2008-2009 to meet the strategic goals and themes that were described in its rolling three-year Strategy for 2008-2011. (Goals and themes altered in the Strategies for 2009-12 and 2010-13.)

Manage and present a portfolio of data services and projects relevant to need

Provide quality assured services for client communities

The aim is for EDINA services to be available 24 hours per day, seven days a week, with a target of 99% uptime over 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 downtime for maintenance resulted in three existing disks being replaced rather than upgraded, resulting in a longer period of downtime than planned.

The uptime for Digimap Collection services and components had been under strain, because of ageing software first introduced in 2000-2001, but still ranging from 97.45% – 98.85%. New software (from Cadcorp) launched in 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 the cache since early October, enabling 27,000 map requests to be met in the short period of 28th October to 6th November. This would have been inconceivable with the older software.)

The EDINA Helpdesk was staffed during normal office hours throughout the year and exceeded performance targets for query resolution.

Unlike physical servers there is no annual limit on scheduled service downtime. Thirteen services at EDINA had more than 624 minutes of scheduled downtime in 2008-2009, but the JISC Executive acknowledged that additional maintenance time was needed for the geospatial services at EDINA until the move to Cadcorp had taken place.

All machine and Local Area Network availability measures were above their agreed Service Levels.

Enhance content and collection development

In 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 distributed computing paradigms (2 projects);
• Investigate the feasibility and cost of adding functionality (search and browse by place) to NewsFilm Online (NFO), Education Image Gallery and Film and Sound Online;
• Crosslink British Universities Newsreel Database (BUND) and NFO; expose NFO service metadata to Google 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 2008-2009 year.

During 2008/2009 EDINA took delivery of large-scale historical Town Plan data from Landmark Information Group. Over the coming year work will be done to offer these through Historic Digimap.

The British Geological Survey are very happy with the uptake of Geology Digimap, and have been drawing up a list of other data sets that might be added to the collection at no extra cost to JISC Collections. Various other approaches have been made to EDINA about additional Collections for Digimap. For example, the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology are talking to JISC Collections and EDINA about making their new Land Cover Map (LCM) available to UK academia through Digimap.

Delivery of the new WellcomeFilm collection to FSOL began in February 2009 and is scheduled to continue until December 2009. A total of 258 new films had been added by 31 July 2009. The service continued to offer access 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 with producing exemplars of the use of NewsFilm Online content in a number of different subject areas in HE. A commenting 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 of Scotland; and from Sir John to individual parish ministers encouraging them to forward the statistical account of their parish, and the original correspondence received by Sir John Sinclair regarding the parish of Forganny were added to the subscription service during 2008/2009.

SALSER, the serials catalogue for Scottish academic and research libraries, was updated in 2009. After much preparatory work, progress was made in making SALSER more current. The Scottish libraries that contribute data to SUNCAT also have it loaded into SALSER now, Stirling University being the latest contributor. Other Scottish libraries make regular updates. Several libraries began contributing once again, including Glasgow Caledonian University and Glasgow School of Art. The SALSER team continued their communication with other 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 17 academic and non-academic organisations in 2008-2009. During the year a significant enhancement was made to the service to enable the creation of agricultural census 'Mash-ups' with a new 'KML' output added to the standard CSV format. KML (Keyhole Markup Language) is a file format that uses XML-based language to manage 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 Geography Data Unit.

A set of learning objects was produced by an e-learning developer on a short-term contract, and experts in User Support, covering geographic concepts for census data learning. A consultant created other online learning materials, which demonstrate the principle of having open materials in Jorum that link to authenticated materials in other services provided by EDINA.

Present a coherent and useful service portfolio

EDINA seeks to provide a coherent and useful service portfolio to its client communities. Management of each individual service lifecycle and how it relates to other services in the portfolio was identified as a crucial factor in achieving this objective, and a number of cross-service groups were established in 2008-2009 to share expertise across the data centre.

Go Geo! and GeoCrossWalk were selected by JISC as pilot cases to test its then-new transition from project to service process, and enabled EDINA to develop expertise in this important area.

Gain understanding by undertaking research into innovative services and enhancements

EDINA exists to add value to the work of our communities by developing and delivering common services at the 'network-level'. Determining what adds value and how we can arrive at the position to deliver takes investment in understanding. By undertaking innovative R&D work, EDINA seeks to gain that understanding and play our part in shaping the future (further information about EDINA projects).

Personalisation projects

During 2008-2009, EDINA has been investigating how services can be presented and personalised to address changing information seeking and user practices. A seven-month project funded by JISC commenced in February 2009, which has been exploring mechanisms to support personalisation across the JISC IE. It follows on from the Developing Personalisation for the Information Environment (DPIE) programme of work, where the final reports from the DPIE1 and DPIE2 projects highlighted tagging and personalised search and recommendation engines as areas for further work. Two 'rapid' demonstrators were designed and built at EDINA to demonstrate:

• Location-based searching for JISC IE services: by taking location information on resources (and services) and using these to sort and rank the results of searches on the basis of geographic proximity to a user-defined location.
• Management and use of service-content references via a shared middleware service: by investigating use of a reference linking knowledge base, with a focus on multimedia resources, that could act as middleware for personalisation 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 is interested in locating libraries that are close to their current location and that hold a copy of a journal article they have found using a resource discovery tool. For the purposes of the project a demonstrator was written that uses the Scholarly Communications website to identify journal articles and then uses the geolocation middleware, to return a result set geographically sorted based on their proximity to the user.

Geospatial projects

In 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 national SDIs. EDINA is involved in several work packages relating to technical architecture, including metadata, data quality control, data schemas transformation and interoperability services. EDINA is contributing experience gained during the EuroGlobalMap (EGM) pilot and its wider experience of providing geographic information into the tertiary academic sector, as well as bringing European academic users to the ESDIN. ESDIN is under the leadership of EuroGeographic, which represents 52 national mapping and cadastral agencies from 43 countries across Europe.

EuroGeoNames (EGN), a European e-Contentplus-funded 30-month project, ended in February 2009. The European Commission considered it a great success. The project team developed a federated gazetteer infrastructure, local services and middleware service architecture for pan-European access to official geographical names 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 the full 'value chain', from data providers to technology partners to value added service retailers. EuroGeographic is now taking the project forward as a European-wide service.

The GeoDigRef project investigated the utility of enhancing existing digitised resources through better indexing of 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. Using three distinct resource collections, and by building two distinct search and browse interfaces, the project showed how a new dimension to search – the 'where' aspect of resources – can be better exploited and may be added to existing collections with relative ease and at little cost. This project provided an exemplar for the broader aim of geo-enablement across the JISC Information Environment, the ultimate aim being to ensure that discovery via geography (the 'where' component of resources which is a cross-cutting constant across the majority of collections e.g. country, place name, postcode, parish name etc) becomes more widely embedded into search paradigms 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 Delivery area of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme, the need for domain specific specialist metadata profiles for purposes of search and discovery across institutional repositories was identified. Subsequently work funded 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). Using existing community-adopted open metadata standards, GAP leveraged well-established international standards in describing geospatial resources within a Dublin Core Application Profile. Uptake and embedding work is continuing; however, wider uptake has stalled while JISC makes a decision on whether spatial should be included within other Application Profiles.

The Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship (COMPASS) project was funded by JISC under its Knowledge Organisation and Semantic Services Programme. Led by EDINA, the project brought together a consortium consisting of experts from the Semantic Interoperability Laboratory at Münster University (Germany), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University Ireland, Galway and Allworlds Geothinking. The project ran from December 2007 to June 2009. COMPASS successfully demonstrated how an ontologically supported knowledge infrastructure for the coastal marine environment could 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 technologies and open standards in the areas of metadata, registries, ontologies and digital libraries with a focus on the geospatial domain.

Access Management projects

During 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 was developed 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 a mechanism to enable inexperienced users to get started quickly but includes more options at installation time – so requiring less manual manipulation of configuration files. Version 2 supports the SAML 2 protocol.
• Discovery Service (next generation WAYF). The Discovery Service is designed to allow the exploitation of the more sophisticated features within the SAML 2 protocol to support discovery. It also includes more 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 interface within 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 support a practical method of inter-federation working. The work involved the development of an Aggregation Engine to allow the swapping of authorised metadata between federations with the intention that a prototype Aggregation Engine will be developed early in 2010.

The work arising from the geospatial SEE-Geo has now been taken up in ESDIN (see page 11), and generated lot 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 Interoperability Experiment, a member of which is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency in the US; and also within the European geospatial testbed, where its use is being promoted as a way of managing access for academia to public sector data sets.

Scholarly Communications projects

The JISC-funded Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas project, which began in August 2008 and ended in July 2009, developed functionality such that users could discover resources on the existing Copac and SUNCAT services and then link from journal titles to Tables of Contents for issues of a journal (using Zetoc), as well 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 has been 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 a particular 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 is possible to pay to receive hard copy available through the British Library Direct Service. This facility is due to be implemented in the SUNCAT service in Autumn 2009.

Many UK universities and colleges maintain OpenURL link servers, which direct users to potential sources of scholarly content. These transactions can be logged and then have the potential to be used in various ways. The aim of the Shared OpenURL data infrastructure investigation project, which started in December 2008 and completed in July 2009, was to scope a UK architecture for the analysis of OpenURL linking data, with the architecture 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 Cost OpenURL Resolver for the JISC IE project, which completed in 2008, reviewed the requirements and means of delivering a low-cost OpenURL resolver service for the JISC IE which would provide means for staff and students 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 requirements analysis. 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 and electronic tables of contents services within the JISC IE. This broker, offered as the GetRef service and used by the University of Stirling as its federated search tool for a number of years, is likely to be withdrawn unless there are requests to the contrary.

The High-Level Thesaurus (HILT) project aims were to ensure that users of the JISC Information Environment could find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse. Phase Four of this 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 on performance and interface issues; hosted the SRW server; and tested embedding of HILT in a development version of the Depot.

EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit) was a one-year project that started in March 2008. It was funded by JISC and carried out in partnership with Textensor Limited. It demonstrated middleware that enabled easier deposit of research papers through batch upload of structured bibliographic metadata from existing sources. It also had the potential to enhance metadata deposit through transfers and re-directs to institutional repositories (IRs). The new workflow and sample user interface developed by the project could help researchers maintain their publications list web page (such as that at PublicationsList.org) which would then be sent in batch mode to a repository (such as the Depot) by pressing a 'Deposit' button, bringing the 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 the Open 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 re-directs potential depositors to the website of their institutional repository, into a stand-alone broker mechanism which 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 interoperability currently faced by researchers who have written a multi-authored journal article from multiple institutions and grant-funding organisations. This project will test the broker model against a number of use case scenarios that have been identified by the SONEX group being supported by JISC for international collaboration. These include 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 resource linking and improving the metadata describing scholarly works. More information about Unlock may be found on page 21.

Continuing Access projects

Piloting 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 information on provision for continuing access to the total corpus of scholarly work published in e-journals. Central to PEPRS is access to appropriate data created by the various agencies that have taken responsibility for preserving electronic 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 IC agreed to provide the project with access to the ISSN Register, a database containing details of all journals that have been assigned an ISSN, of which approximately 66,000 are electronic serials. It is the intention to match up records of electronic journals that have been preserved by the agencies mentioned above with the information about those journals held in the Register thereby helping to provide users of the service with comprehensive and accurate information. Papers on the project were published in two journals, and presentations have been made at conferences in four countries, reflecting the international character of this initiative. A paper, based on the presentations, has also been submitted for publication.

The Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of access via NESLi2 (PECAN) project is a five-month scoping study which commenced in July 2009. In order to assist UK HEIs with the procurement of electronic scholarly material, the JISC and JISC Collections support the scheme called NESLi2. The NESLi2 Model Licence contains a post cancellation clause but it is important that methods are devised to support its use, including a central local load facility for e-journal material. The PECAN project will investigate whether this framework could be extended to provide 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 reliable information on the journal content that has been subscribed to by libraries via NESLi2) and a secure virtual archive (providing secure and robust access to back journal content). The project firstly aims to investigate the required policy and procedures needed to establish an accurate registry of subscription information and, secondly it aims to investigate and propose a candidate technical infrastructure for a central UK journal archive that would provide appropriate controlled access to licensed material, in a robust and secure manner.

Multimedia projects

The Visual and Sound Materials (VSM) Portal Project started in September 2005 over two phases, with a scoping study followed by the implementation of a portal demonstrator. In February 2009 JISC funded Phase Three, to run until autumn 2009. Further JISC funding for the project was indicated until 2011, dependent upon review by May 2010. The portal does not hold any media assets itself but allows users to search for such assets from a growing number of collections and services (currently 15) using metadata held locally and cross-searched. Phase Three 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 with an 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 project activity

Provide effective outreach and support services

EDINA's policy on provision of documentation and help facilities is outlined in its Service Level Definition available from JISC's Monitoring Unit (MU) (http://www.mu.jisc.ac.uk/slas/edina/).

Helpdesk

The EDINA Helpdesk is the primary point of contact for all enquiries concerning EDINA services and successfully resolves enquiries from end-users and support staff. Helpdesk staff categorise queries and enter them 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 as appropriate.

EDINA provides technical and operational support to members of the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research through the federation operator JANET(UK). Support calls from members are forwarded from the JANET(UK) support desk to EDINA for resolution. While the User Support team at EDINA has sufficient experience and knowledge to resolve most technical and administrative queries, it has the backup 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 from smaller academic institutions (HE and FE) and commercial publishers. The SDSS federation support team's resources include a number of tools, mainly provided by the SDSS Expert group. These include test SPs and IdPs and certificate checkers. The latter are especially useful for advising federation members when certificates are about to require renewal.

EDINA website

The EDINA website continues to act as the main access point for users of its services. In 2008-2009, small changes were made to the site following the major re-launch in February 2008. Publicity material in the form of the 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 EDINA website. In addition, individual posters were produced for exhibitions and to supplement the standard range of materials. EDINA's quarterly newsletter Newsline continued to play an important role in helping academic support staff and others with an interest in its services to keep abreast of developments.

Service Demonstrations

EDINA continues to provide service demonstrations for new services and interface updates. The service demonstrations 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.

Training

16 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 survey of 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 very effective in meeting their learning objectives. Trainers' knowledge and presentation, and course materials were typically rated as very good. New exercises were added to the training throughout the year, particularly to the Digimap Collections course. The content and delivery of face-to-face training courses was regularly reviewed and updated to reflect the learning objectives of participants.

A trial programme of short online training sessions, using a web conferencing subscription service, was run in 2008/2009. The web conferencing service allows User Support more frequent interaction with site representatives across the UK than is possible with face-to-face training alone. In addition to the courses detailed above, User Support staff also contributed significantly to three workshops run by the ESRC Census Programme at UK venues. EDINA staff delivered presentations and skills practice sessions on the UKBORDERS services at these workshops.

Social Media

Social Media has become an increasingly important part of EDINA communications and a Social Media Officer was designated in May 2009. This role contributed to the social media element of service and project development and outreach. The post also incorporates a watching and advisory role on social media tools and trends.

In 2008/2009, blogs for Digimap, SUNCAT, DISC-UK DataShare, ShareGeo, Land Life Leisure and Jorum continued to communicate service developments and news to EDINA service users, whilst a new Jorum Twitter stream (@Jorumteam) was also established in March 2009.

In addition to attending numerous social media events, from BarCamps and a Facebook Symposium to the NeSC (National eScience Centre) Web 2.0 week, a number of presentations were delivered. EDINA was also involved 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 Content Alliance/Netskills workshop in July 2009. The 'Beyond the Repository Fringe' event in July 2009 allowed EDINA to combine live blogging, twitter (and conference hashtags), streaming video, photo sharing and a collaborative wiki to build a sense of community and encourage discussion during and after the event.

JISCmail

EDINA continued to make use of various JISCmail lists to keep users and support staff informed of service changes, e.g. for Digimap Collections to encourage discussion about the service between users in different institutions and disciplines. Other separate groups by email lists were contacted throughout the year with important announcements as well as to enlist volunteers for trials and early adopters to new services and projects. 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 Support

Support 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 through Digimap, demand for support in using both the data and GI software will inevitably increase. EDINA is trying to respond and offered courses aimed at end users and not just site representatives. However, the lack of local support remains a concern.

Beginning in June 2009, EDINA undertook a survey of institutional support staff to establish what support is provided within UK academic institutions for the use of maps, spatial data and specialist GIS/CAD software, as well as support for online geospatial resources. The work is being done in conjunction with the JISC Geospatial Working Group, to which reports will be submitted when complete. One of the headline findings is that 48% of support staff rated their institutions' support for the use of GIS and geospatial resources as insufficient or non-existent.

SUNCAT

The SUNCAT team conducted two surveys during 2008/2009. One addressed the issue of duplication, whilst the other focused on Impact and Satisfaction for users of the service.

Collaboration

EDINA collaborated with other related providers in promoting and marketing its services. Examples include the Census Registration Service (CRS) for UKBORDERS and JISC Digital Media for publicising the Education Image Gallery. Links with the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs) continued. EDINA User Support staff attended 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 part of 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 services

EDINA pays much attention to the presentation of its services in terms of utility and usability across the full range of users, including those with legacy hardware and browsers, inexperienced users, and those with disabilities.

In 2008-2009, the User Support team developed their knowledge of usability testing methods at a session delivered by Guy Redwood from SimpleUsability. In addition, four members of User Support participated in University of Edinburgh training sessions, 'Testing the Usability of your website'. User testing of two EDINA services, 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 to observe how users performed tasks on the new interface designs. These sessions were recorded for analysis using Camtasia. 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 and integration with other environments, especially those using mobile technologies.

Funding was received in 2008-2009 to commence the Digimap Alternative Access Scoping Study, which will investigate the potential and the demand for mobile GIS in H/FE education and research. EDINA aims to understand the needs of the user community and suggest possible ways that allow the potential of mobile GIS to be realised throughout the UK academic community. The project commenced in September 2009 and will run to April 2010.

The Director of EDINA established a cross-service mobile Internet group in EDINA to discuss strategy and planning for delivery of EDINA services to the mobile user. His aim was to have a generic/coherent view of what is required to deliver mobile internet services, part of which is to work out what mobile equipment EDINA requires to support development and testing, and how this should be done. He also wanted this coupled with consideration of which members of staff should be given mobile devices in order to do their jobs, and what equipment they need.

In 2008-2009, the cross-service group identified members of staff who were 'networkers' and required mobile devices to enable them to do their jobs more efficiently; staff members who went out occasionally, and would required a pool of devices to support them; and software engineers who required equipment to support development 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 of learning 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 internationally

EDINA works at local, national and international levels in each of its strategic business areas (SBAs), engaging in initiatives that assist productivity in research, learning and teaching. It plans to further develop its links with important national and international groups, including governmental, educational, standards development, research data, commercial, web services and grid development organisations. Some of the JISC's key strategic targets are expressed in contacts between EDINA and these organisations, and achieved in the joint work undertaken, 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 to collaboration and synergy. Its national and international contacts are also important for the University of Edinburgh'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 educational community. In addition, EDINA continues to value work with colleagues in North America and is laying the groundwork for working with the emergent China through links with the Library of the Academy of Sciences.

Geospatial activity

Some of EDINA's geospatial activities are world-class and especially important as the scientific community prepares to implement the EU INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) Directive. This has led to productive partnerships between EDINA and European organisations in the academic, commercial and governmental sectors seeking to implement the directive. For example, the Geo-services team has secured a substantial 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 the European SDI is rolled out using the mechanism of the INSPIRE Directive. ESDIN also provides the means for EDINA to engage with national mapping agencies within Europe, and also with global initiatives such as GlobalMap. The team has also been working with Eurogeographics and the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories for Europe (AGILE) to reveal the state of play within each European member state regarding higher education access to national mapping agency data.

The academic European persistent geospatial testbed being developed by the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories Europe (AGILE) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), EuroSDR (effectively the research arm of the National Mapping and Charting Agencies represented at a European level), will continue to be a focus of activity for EDINA, with EDINA having specific involvement in aspects of the testbed relating to service security.

e-Framework activities

The e-Framework for Education and Research was initially established by JISC and Australia's Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), formerly the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). The New Zealand Ministry of Education (NZMoE) and the Netherlands SURF Foundation (SURF) joined in 2007. EDINA is participating in a number of e-Framework activities and has been invited by JISC to undertake an interoperability project with New Zealand, which will include the mapping of geospatial standards to the E-Framework for Education and Research.

Scholarly communications

Scholarly communications work in EDINA has close links with the major national and specialist libraries, as well as libraries from some of the largest HE institutions in the UK. EDINA also has fruitful relationships with academic 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 national facility to support UK/JISC policy for open access, is now an international facility to help authors release material under terms of open access and deposit in their institutional repository. EDINA is also playing an active part in the international work of the JISC Repositories Programme, through the SONEX Group (on scholarly output notification and exchange) and through use of the OA-Repository Junction project as testbed for the use case scenarios identified by the SONEX Group.

Continuing Access

EDINA has active commitment and responsibility for continuing access to the growing corpus of scholarly resources in digital format, with the University of Edinburgh acting as the European Archive Node for the CLOCKSS digital preservation of e-journal content, with membership of the CLOCKSS Executive and its Governing Board. EDINA acts as an open access platform for orphaned e-journal content from the University's Archive Node.

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 24thAnnual 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.

DISC-UK DataShare

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.

Access Management

Members of the Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) team at EDINA provide expert support to JISC and continue to work closely with colleagues in the ongoing development of the UK Federation for Access 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 contact with the national federations in the USA, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, France, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

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. EDINA staff members were involved with the development of the SAML2 protocol and have contributed to the Shibboleth code base.

International Expertise

Some EDINA/Data Library staff members are recognised internationally as experts in their fields. 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 of EDINA has worked with Chad La Joie, SWITCH (a core Shibboleth developer), to develop a protocol and technical architecture for the aggregation and distribution of federation metadata to facilitate inter-federation working. It is expected that this 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.

The Head of EDINA's Geo-services team, David Medyckyj-Scott, is currently acting on JISC's behalf at their request with respect to both INSPIRE and the UKSDI, brokering contact between the UK Government Department with responsibility, DEFRA, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the JISC Geospatial Working Group. He is also an elected member of the Council of the Association of Geographic Information 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 Geospatial Testbed 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 Association for 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 National Information 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 Third Expert Meeting of the EU's Open e-Learning Content Observatory Services (OLCOS) (2006). He is a Past President of IASSIST. He has contributed to the Knowledge Exchange (KE), a pan-European initiative that aims to foster co-operation and collaboration between the four partner organisations (JISC, Danmark's Elektroniske Fag-og Forskningsbibliotek (DEF), Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, Germany) and SURF Foundation (The Netherlands), recently attending a KE licensing workshop on digital preservation. He presented to the Library of the Academy of Sciences in Chengdu, China, and was involved in the ISSN Directors' Meeting at the National Library of China, Beijing. He also presented at the recent conference of the Seventh 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 Workshop in Amsterdam, March 2009. He has also continued to be involved with the group taking this strand of activity forward 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 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.

Develop interoperable services and infrastructure

EDINA has implemented various established standards for interoperability in services and projects, including Z39.50, SRU/W, OpenURL and OAI/PMH. Z39.50 and SRU/W provides search and retrieval of metadata across bibliographic and multimedia services, and are heavily used for federated searching. OpenURL provides context-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 the HILT 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 at the forefront of developing and promoting open standards for the exchange, discovery, exploitation and rights management of geographic information. These subsequently become ISO standards. EDINA has been an associate member of the OGC for several years, and is actively engaged in implementing OGC interoperability standards as well as contributing to the development of new standards or profiles of existing standards. (For example, staff members within the geo-services team have been working with the leader of the OGC Security Working Group on an architecture for securing OGC Web Services using Shibboleth and GeoXACML.) One of the interesting challenges has been the integration of these standards with the others promoted and used within the JISC IE and e-Infrastructure. However, by deploying services using these standards, EDINA will be in a position 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 in a web-services environment. This activity was undertaken in cooperation with colleagues from Germany and advice from Chad La Joie of SWITCH.

EDINA began looking at newer technologies including ontologies, knowledge-based infrastructures, and the use of third party APIs provided by the likes of Google and Geonames. Use of third party APIs allowed EDINA to exploit services whose content is global compared to the UK focus of most of the collections hosted by EDINA. As an example, the geoparser, part of GeoCrossWalk, was upgraded to georeference documents with place 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 access tools to create and publish standards-compliant geospatial metadata. Launched as a JISC service in November 2008, average monthly page requests doubled during the first six months of 2009 to over 21,000. With the appointment 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, a recognised pioneer of GIS archaeological applications, has formally incorporated GeoDoc into student coursework in the Archaeology Department at the University of Southampton. This has resulted in a private institutional metadata node holding over 250 metadata records. Dr Wheatley said, 'The tools provided a useful way to encourage my students to document their datasets and introduce ideas about interoperability and re-purposing spatial data'.

Go-Geo! is a critical component in the UK academic SDI and, as a consequence of being interoperable, it can also be a part of the developing UK SDI. However, to be compliant the metadata needs to be presented to the UK SDI in the correct format. Thus work began on aligning AGMAP with the new government GEMINI2 and European INSPIRE metadata profiles. The Go-Geo! service manager was invited to attend a UK Location Programme meeting, part of the UK SDI development activity, to present on lessons learned from running a national geospatial portal.

GeoCrossWalk, now re-branded Unlock, the middleware gazetteer and georeferencing infrastructure service, was launched as a JISC service in November 2008 and is available for use in the Digimap OS Collection pages. The principal purpose of GeoCrossWalk is to provide a shared terminology service within the JISC Information Environment (IE) that can underpin geographic searching and georeferencing. GeoCrossWalk is designed to make geographic searching transparent by 'crosswalking' these different geographies and is analogous to a shared terminology service.

Another middleware service, the OpenURL Router was developed to address the issue of allowing linkage from bibliographic services to OpenURL resolvers. The OpenURL Router provides a central registry detailing OpenURL resolvers, the institutions to which they belonged, and certain details (UK Federation identifiers, IP addresses and domain names) that help in identifying members of that institution. This allows referring bibliographic services to address OpenURL links to the correct resolver for each end user, without any prior knowledge of the user or their institution. The OpenURL Router showed continued strong growth in usage over 2008/2009, with the number of institutions registered rising from 83 to 94.

The Shibboleth Development and Support Services (SDSS) Expert group at EDINA released Discovery service version 1.1, which includes dynamic searching and embedded WAYF capabilities. The group is working on an evolving 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. The metadata is signed daily to ensure its integrity before being shipped to the Federation operator for distribution to Federation members.

Sustain and develop a well-founded UK national academic data centre

Provide effective governance and management of resources

Governance

EDINA operates as a HEFCE-related body under the terms of a Funding Agreement signed between HEFCE and the University of Edinburgh. A Management Board that offers specialist advice and guidance has been established under the terms of the Agreement, and it met three times during 2008-2009. The Director of EDINA 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 the JISC 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 an employee, the Director reports to the Vice Principal and Chief Information Officer of the University; the latter sits on the EDINA Management Board.

The EDINA Management Team met fortnightly and is responsible for leadership of activity, finance and resource planning in the data centre. The Business Development Group guides the development of new project and service activity within EDINA and met fortnightly.

Estate

The move to commercial premises in Edinburgh improved the working environment for EDINA staff and provided 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 staff members 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 to commercial premises in Birchwood, Warrington, Cheshire in July 2009.

It is anticipated that the additional accommodation in Edinburgh and Warrington will address for some time the constraints previously faced by the organisation due to lack of accommodation for staff.

Finance

Priority was given in 2008-2009 to improving methods of projecting income, activity and hence staffing and accommodation requirements. EDINA started work on improving its management accounting systems to make better-informed business decisions. In common with many other organisations that receive much of their funding from grant money, EDINA faces challenges in being able to react quickly to opportunities when staff members are already fully committed in their current work. EDINA's Strategy and the rolling business development plans in each of EDINA's business areas address the whole of the activity undertaken by the data centre, and not just its JISC-funded activity. Service Implementation Plans for JISC-funded activity are guided by these documents. The annual Operational Plan for JISC is based on the Service Implementation Plans.

Managing Risk

EDINA provides a Risk Register each year to JISC, as part of the requirements of the Funding Agreement and SLD. 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, and the second IT capability. In addition, in March 2009, the Management Team held an Awayday to assist with strategic planning.

The emergence of the Swine Flu Pandemic in 2008-2009 led to the establishment of a Pandemic Flu workgroup in EDINA. The group produced the following outputs:

• A Pandemic Flu procedures document, to capture in one place all the information that staff would need in order to cope with an outbreak of the flu that affected many staff members at once. The document is in 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 modems from our pool of mobile equipment.
• The group coordinated the production of detailed staff back-up plans for each of our business areas and identified workarounds in relevant areas. In addition, chains of command in each service area were identified.

EDINA has dependency on others in Information Services in the University of Edinburgh for keeping hardware operational. This aspect is covered by the University's contingency plans, the same as those that cover vital University information systems e.g. payroll. EDINA's services are designed to run unattended 24/7, and plans exist for people to attend wherever events occur.

Enhance resource base through technology and staff talent

As 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'. Staff development plans for each member of staff were agreed between the staff member and his/her line manager, in line with the annual requirements of the University. EDINA staff participated in training events organised by IS and other groups within the University, as well as external training and development opportunities. A list of conferences, courses and presentations attended and given in 2008-2009 may be found at the website (http://edina.ac.uk/about/annrep/0809/app6.html).

EDINA aims to ensure that cross-fertilisation of ideas and 'know-how' takes place in the data centre, by means of regular workshops and meetings in which staff can share their knowledge, and by provision of online tools such as the staff intranet. Cross-service workgroups were established in the following areas to share and exchange expertise during 2008-2009:

Repositories and preservation

Mobile internet

Web technology watch

Schools

In addition, EDINA aims to share and exchange knowledge with partners in the UK and beyond. This enables learning from others, as well as contributing to their learning, and builds expertise and capacity. More information about work done outside EDINA may be found in Section 3.

Develop quality technical capability

EDINA aims to develop and maintain exceptional IT capability, by engaging in 'technology watch' and thereby remaining relevant to the community; and by commanding sufficient resources, in terms of human skills, software and hardware, for planning and deployment. EDINA continues to gain from its position inside the University 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 the period 2008-2011 from the JISC Capital Programme.

In 2008-2009, Sun Fujitsu Sparc 64 servers were purchased to replace the existing Sun Enterprise servers that were purchased in 2003. The migration of Digimap to new hardware has largely been completed and migration of Bibliographic/Multimedia services is ongoing. This hardware replacement has resulted in significant performance gains and increased resilience. Annual maintenance costs have also been reduced. Further capital spend 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 room situated at a remote site several miles distant. EDINA has bought a fixed number of 'slots' in the new SAN-based backup infrastructure purchased by the University, and the necessity for operator intervention has been removed. Future additions to backup capacity can be made when necessary by buying additional 'slots' in the University's infrastructure.

JISC have also funded a separate EDINA development environment. This is being used along with Solaris container technology to cleanly separate development and service activity. This approach was used successfully for 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 but should 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 Gigabit connections configured for automatic failover. An extra Gigabit network switch has also been deployed so that network connections are dual-pathed.

In common with the University's Information Services group, EDINA is utilising the ITIL IT Service Management framework to ensure that it improves its IT services in line with best practice processes. Several staff members have attended University-arranged courses.

In 2008-2009, EDINA has been reviewing software systems used across the data centre, with a view to ensuring efficient and effective use of software. EDINA will continue to monitor open source solutions and offerings from 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 provide existing services via a combination of current and new access routes. EDINA plans to provide support for production web services. Its hardware and software infrastructure will need to be able to accommodate the corresponding growth in demand.

For internal services, flexibility and ease of maintenance are primary considerations. In 2008-2009, the EDINA helpdesk/licence maintenance system Helios was re-implemented in a Windows VM environment, replacing CGI scripts by Cold Fusion as the application server, with Microsoft's SQL-Server replacing Ingres for the database. EDINA also recruited a small-systems support officer, to provide technical support to staff.

Ensure EDINA's long-term sustainability

EDINA produces three-year rolling Strategies. In 2008-2009, the Strategy for 2009-2012 was made available at the website and work was undertaken to produce the Strategy for 2010-2013, which was published in Autumn 2009. Noting the gap between high-level strategic planning and annual operational planning, EDINA also produces three-year rolling business development plans, and the Business Development Plan for 2009-2012 may be 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 the forthcoming three years, identify funding sources for the activities planned, and monitor risks that could undermine the sustainability of the organisation. Service enhancement activities were notified to JISC in the Service Improvement Plans. Some were funded, as described earlier, but many were unfunded and go forward into the current year as possibilities for the SIPs for 2010-2011. The Business Development team monitored funding opportunities that were notified by JISC and other organisations and some project funding was received that is detailed in Section 3.

In 2008-2009, EDINA contributed to the University's IS Strategy, Annual Plan and Annual Report under the heading of 'National and International Engagement'.

The Director of EDINA was invited to attend a meeting in May 2009 to discuss the forthcoming JISC Strategy for 2010-2012. He provided a paper to this meeting, and comment was also made by EDINA on the draft JISC Strategy when it was published. EDINA ensured that its Strategy for 2010-2013 took into account the draft provisions 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 watch on any opportunities coming along that enable the data centre to do this, especially, but not exclusively, from the European Union and the Research Councils.