2. Highlights of the Year 2010-2011

UK RepositoryNet+ - shared repository infrastructure for the UK

The year closed with the exciting news that EDINA had been given leadership to initiate and manage the repository infrastructure for research literature repositories, following a competitive bid. Working closely with the JISC Executive, and with key providers, the aim over the next 20 months is to create and foster shared infrastructure, both social and technical – the purpose of which is to enable deposit, curation and dissemination of research literature. Alongside advocacy for Open Access, this is part of the JISC strategy to work with research funders in promoting the visibility of research at universities, including preparation for the Research Excellence Framework.

A central task for the project is to assist universities and colleges as they embed repositories within institutional processes at an economic cost and demonstrate value for researchers and their funders. Activity is now getting underway, with discussion at the recent Repository Fringe at Edinburgh of our mapping of the main actors and workflows in the repository landscape. The intention is to use this feedback to help devise sustainable ways of sharing service-quality components that help reduce costs and improve quality.

Awards and key publications

EDINA has received a Highly Commended mention at the annual Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Awards for Innovation and Best Practice, which was deservedly won by MapAction for their global disaster work. The commendation for EDINA was on the basis of the paper given at GeoCommunity 2010 by Tim Riley on migrating Digimap to a new GIS infrastructure.

The GOLD Certificate for the best overall resource was awarded to the new Digimap for Schools service in the Geographical Association’s 2011 Publishers’ Awards at the Association’s Annual Conference in April 2011. The award was presented to EDINA’s Director, Peter Burnhill, and Ordnance Survey’s Director-General and CEO, Vanessa Lawrence. Over 2500 schools have so far taken advantage of Ordnance Survey’s voucher scheme providing free access to Digimap for Schools.

An article entitled “Lowering the barriers from discovery to delivery: a JISC funded EDINA and Mimas project”, co-authored by Fred Guy at EDINA (Fred Guy, Joy Elizabeth Palmer, [2010] "Lowering the barriers from Discovery to Delivery: a JISC funded EDINA and Mimas project", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 38 Iss: 3, pp.158 - 167 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=1876720&show=html&nolog=67829& http://www.emeraldinsight.com/authors/literati/awards.htm?year=2011&PHPSESSID=1grib12rulqh5p7sog6ja28b64), was chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2011.

A paper entitled “Geospatial resources for supporting data standards, guidance and best practice in health informatics”, co-authored by Tony Mathys at EDINA, was published in BMC Research Notes (Tony Mathys, Maged N Kamel Boulos BMC Research Notes 2011, 4:19 [26 January 2011] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1756-0500/4/19) and holds Highly Accessed status.

A Techwatch report entitled “Augmented Reality for Smartphones” was commissioned by UKOLN for JISC Observatory from Ben Butchart of EDINA (http://blog.observatory.jisc.ac.uk/2011/04/08/techwatch-report-augmented-reality-for-smartphones/). It was peer reviewed by experts in the field and has received international recognition.

The first phase of the Walking Through Time project was a simple idea: "SatNav for historical maps" - a phone app that combined GPS technology with old maps to allow users to "walk through time". Developed to a working prototype available on all GPS-enabled smart phones for Edinburgh only, the original application caught the imagination of academics, geographers and historians worldwide. In 2010-2011, we have developed it as an iPhone application.

Citations included:

• Herald Scotland, 3 January 2010
• The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 14 January 2010
• Edinburgh Journal, 20 January 2010
• The Australian Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies, Winter 2010

The project also won second prize in the ALISS Quarterly best article of the year award.

The AddressingHistory project, which created an online website and crowdsourcing tool combining historical Post Office Directories and contemporaneous maps, gained significant attention from the local history and genealogy communities.

Citations included:

• CAIRT: Newsletter of the Scottish Maps Forum, July 2010
• ALISS Quarterly, July 2010
• Practical Family History, July & December 2010
• Family History Monthly, August & December 2010
• Discover My Past Scotland, August 2010
• IS News: the Newsletter of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland, October 2010
• The Herald Scotland, 15 November 2010
• The Scottish Genealogist: Quarterly Journal of the Scottish Genealogy Society, December 2010
• ProgrammableWeb, 17 December 2010

Key Events in our calendar

Edinburgh was the place to be in September last year and August this year for the respective Repository Fringe 2010 and 2011 events, co-hosted with the University and the Digital Curation Centre. Record numbers of delegates participated in these interactive events and even more enjoyed the event amplifications orchestrated by EDINA’s social media officer. Videos of all 2011 speakers are available on YouTube.

The experience of the organising committee in arranging successive Repository Fringe events over four years, and their collective reputation in the repository community, were important factors in the award of the Seventh International Conference on Open Repositories 2012 (OR12) to the University of Edinburgh. This will take place in July next year.

EDINA was a gold sponsor of this year's prestigious INSPIRE conference held at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre from 27 June to 1 July 2011. We had several papers in the conference programme as well as an exhibition stand at the event. We also amplified our presence by tweeting at regular intervals - adding content, retweeting interesting posts, flagging up EDINA papers etc.

The new Digimap for Schools service was launched at Graveney School in Wandsworth, London, on 10 November 2010 by Vanessa Lawrence, Director-General and CEO of Ordnance Survey, and Baroness Joan Hanham, the Minister with oversight of OS as a national mapping agency. Peter Burnhill and other staff from EDINA were present.

A high-profile event on 9 December at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics, attended by Fiona Hyslop, Scotland’s Minister for Culture & External Affairs, provided the public launch of a major online oral archive, with which EDINA has had a long association. Tobar an Dualchais makes available more than 15,000 recordings from Scotland’s past.

AddressingHistory was launched on 17 November at an amplified event at the National Library of Scotland. The launch event provided an opportunity to celebrate Scottish history and to meet many local history and genealogy experts, community groups and bloggers.

Close working with the University of Edinburgh’s Library Special Collections for activity funded by the AHRC led to the successful launch of the Carmichael Watson website which made accessible an XML-enabled database on the papers of the pioneering folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832-1912), the foremost collection of its kind. This was celebrated in a well-regarded conference, Alexander Carmichael: Collecting, Controversy and Contexts.

Discovery

A recurrent driver in our work during 2010-2011 has been to contribute to the RDTF Vision (PDF file), now being taken forward as Discovery, the metadata ecology for research and education in the UK.

Its focus is on discoverability, one major aspect of which is greatly assisted by geo-enabling through Unlock, the shared terminology service underpinning geographic searching and geo-referencing, using text mining techniques devised by the Language Technology Group at the University of Edinburgh to extract place-names from resources and enable collections to be searched by location.

The scale, nature and comprehensiveness of the SUNCAT metadata, covering as it does the serials’ records of legal deposit and many major research libraries in the UK and Ireland, means that it is a priceless resource and potentially of great value for reuse. Work has been carried out to explore the issues of making the data open, both a technical and legal challenge.

A project is under way to produce Linked Open Data output from several different EDINA projects and services and to provide in-house expertise in linked data and related technologies to others in the form of an “infokit”.

An article recommender prototype based on OpenURL Router data was developed as an example of how the data could be used. This recently won an award: commended use of the OpenURL Router Data in the Discovery & DevCSI Developers Competition. This is a different type of ‘engagement’ for EDINA, involving participation in Discovery as a user of open data.

A key presentation, Aggregation as a Tactic to support Discovery, by Peter Burnhill and Stuart Macdonald, was given at the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI7), Geneva, in June 2011.

Service Highlights

JISC Collections and EDINA were awarded the responsibility to manage the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research (the federation), with handover in August 2011. The federation now has over 850 members and 1,250 entities, the largest academic deployment in the world.

JISC Collections, as the legal entity, manages member enrolment, training, reporting and promotion; EDINA is the federation’s technical and operational support provider.

The SDSS Expert Group at EDINA continued its successful collaboration with Internet2 and the Shibboleth Consortium in order to contribute internationally to the development and maintenance of the Shibboleth infrastructure.

The WSTIERIA project, completed in March 2011, successfully demonstrated two methods of using the federation for non browser based machine-to-machine interactions (“web services”).

EDINA launched JISC MediaHub, the definitive academic video, sound and image resource for UK HE and FE.

The beta version of JISC MediaHub was released in April, followed by a full service release in August. Over 100 institutions have already subscribed to JISC MediaHub as part of the JISC eCollections service.

The service hosts multiple collections licensed or purchased by JISC Collections and aggregates metadata and links to multimedia content held by other collection-owners.

The JISC MediaHub service is also an example of participation in Discovery as a user of open data, as mentioned above - it uses CultureGrid open metadata.

This academic year has seen consolidation and rationalisation of the services offered from the Digimap platform. Building on the introduction of the Roam based mapping services last year there has been much harmonisation of the source code so that service enhancements can be applied across collections e.g. Annotation and Measurement tools, which have been added to all the Digimap services, including Digimap for Schools.

Usage continued to increase in 2010-2011. Users of all the Digimap services created nearly 11 million maps, and downloaded very significant volumes of data. Over 100,000 requests for data were made and nearly 1 million tiles of data were taken. On top of this over 15.75 million Km2 of OS MasterMap® data was downloaded.

Ancient Roam, a facility in Historic Digimap, now allows users to compare two historical maps of the same location from different decades, side by side. Using the 2up View users can view a location and easily see how the landscape has changed over time.

Launched in October 2010, Digimap OpenStream now has over 1700 registered users.

OpenStream enables users of desktop GIS to have the most current up-to-date Ordnance Survey streamed live to their desktop without the need of storing and managing data. For those creating web mash-ups the service delivers up-to-date mapping in a fast, interoperable manner.

ShareGeo Open, a repository service for the sharing of geospatial data, also launched in autumn 2010.

ShareGeo Open now has over 140 geospatial datasets available for reuse by anyone licensed under Creative Commons.

EDINA’s role in creating, implementing and supporting Jorum, the UK’s national repository for learning and teaching resources, came to a successful conclusion in July 2011 with the repository providing access to over 14,000 resources across a variety of subject areas. Jorum has been taken forward into service by Mimas, the national data centre based at the University of Manchester, from August 2011.

EDINA’s expertise in DSpace customisation, licensing and service delivery enabled the provision of a robust socio-technical infrastructure for Jorum and for academic content more generally. A robust legal and policy framework was created for the service and the technical infrastructure has been made available under open source licences for others to reuse and repurpose.

EDINA has continued to advance work to assist the library community in ensuring Continuity of Access to Scholarly Content, for which EDINA is gaining good reputation nationally and internationally.

EDINA continues to provide support to the UK LOCKSS Alliance community and has been contributing to the development of the LOCKSS software to support integration with library link resolver systems. In addition, EDINA has continued to act as the Open Access platform for triggered content for CLOCKSS.

Since 2008 EDINA has been working in partnership with the International Standard Serial Number International Centre (ISSN IC) on the “Piloting an e-Journal Preservation Registry Service” (PEPRS) project and at the end of April 2011 released a beta service for public use. This work is being taken forward as ‘The Keepers’ Registry’.

EDINA has now begun work on phase two of a pilot project to improve post-cancellation access provision to scholarly content (PECAN), with the objective of delivering a pilot ‘entitlement registry’ to provide an authoritative record of access entitlement.

The OpenDepot.org service launch was timed to coincide with the Repository Fringe 2010 and was our contribution to Open Access Week from 18-24 October. It has continued to be used by researchers worldwide as a platform to make their research literature available on an open access basis, with a weekly average of one or two deposits and over one hundred redirects to local repository services.

The redirects were made possible by the Open Access Repository Junction project which has successfully completed its phase one stage, and will develop its proof-of-concept broker into a service in phase two due to take place this coming year.

Spatial Data Infrastructures

We have continued to advance thinking within the geospatial arena both nationally and internationally with ongoing work on security, geospatial data infrastructures and interoperability.

The GoGeo geo-data portal service is regarded as a critical component of the UK Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). A new interface for the site featuring improved usability, functionality and visual design, went live in May 2011. Its online geospatial metadata creation tool, GeoDoc, enables creators of geospatial data to document their data to a variety of standards-compliant schemas.

GoGeo and GeoDoc combined ensure the UK HE sector can engage with the UK Location Programme and the INSPIRE Directive at the EU level.

EDINA was funded by JISC to undertake the Geospatial Engagement and Community Outreach (GECO) project, the overarching purpose of which is to foster self-help communities of users of geospatial resources and champion awareness of the INSPIRE Directive in the sector.

We are working in partnership with the Scottish Government and the British Geological Survey to develop a pilot geospatial discovery metadata service as a key component of a Scottish SDI.

We work under the auspices of the international E-Framework for Education and Research, founded by JISC and other international partners, in the Geospatial e-Framework Collaboration with Landcare Research, New Zealand.

This year saw the completion of the European Spatial Data Infrastructure Network (ESDIN) project. Working within Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) processes, EDINA contributed by successfully demonstrating how Shibboleth can be used to protect the OGC Web Services that underpin SDI. A number of GIS vendors have modified their commercial software as a consequence of this work – which was showcased at the INSPIRE 2011 conference.

Social Media

EDINA sees Social Media as a core channel for communicating and engaging with service users, project partners and stakeholders and in 2010-2011 we continued to enhance our uses of these media. We also launched the EDINA Social Media Guidelines, which have received positive feedback and widespread interest both within and beyond the academic sector.

Benefits and impact information

For the first time in the academic year 2010-2011, EDINA and other JISC Service Providers were required under their Service Level Agreements (SLA) to provide benefits and impact achievements information to the JISC Monitoring Unit (MU) in addition to the quantitative information usually reported.

Surveys were carried out across most of our services. We reported the results to the MU in February 2011 and have made them available at our website (http://edina.ac.uk/impact/).

The vast majority (typically well over 80%) of the respondents found the services easy to use, saved time, and said that they would recommend them to others.

EDINA determined to focus positively on ratings and comments that indicated the need to make some services simpler for inexpert users. EDINA has long engaged with this group of its users and pioneered services that are easier to use.

Technical Infrastructure improvements

Recurrent hardware funding from JISC continued in 2010-2011, the third year of an agreed 3-year upgrade spend.

The additional servers which were purchased in 2009-10 are in service and providing a failover service for almost all EDINA services. Over the year there has been major refurbishment of the University machine room at King's Building. This provided a major test of our new replicated service capability. Services were successfully 'failed-over' to the backup site on a number of occasions avoiding the necessity for extended service downtime. Some major software upgrades have also been conducted without downtime owing to the availability of a replicated service.

There has been a continuation over the year towards virtualisation under VMWare, a necessary prerequisite for the evaluation and adoption of cloud computing solutions.