Repositories and Research Information Management/Preservation Infrastructure

Open Repositories 2012 (OR2012) – An international gathering amplified

Strong program, wide variety of perspectives. The conference draws impressive expertise. Very friendly and supportive community. Excellent local arrangements and communications. Well organized. Nice job!
[Response to delegate survey]

EDINA has gained an excellent reputation over the past few years for using social media to amplify various events for the benefit of attendees and for those who could not be present. This was a contributing factor in EDINA, the University of Edinburgh and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) winning the bid to host the Seventh International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2012), which took place in Edinburgh in July 2012.

The theme and title of this year's event, Open Services for Open Content: Local In for Global Out, reflected the current move towards open content, 'augmented content', distributed systems and data delivery infrastructures. A strong current of research data-related topics emerged in this year's programme for the first time. The event attracted over 450 delegates from 34 countries, with many others in the repository community looking to the event as a key source of information and innovation. We complemented formal conference activity by outreach across multiple social media platforms. Over 4,000 tweets were sent during the week, with over 100 blog posts, write-ups and reports from delegates during and since the event.

UK RepositoryNet + – infrastructure for open access research literature

While this infrastructure will be designed to meet the needs of UK research, it is set and must operate effectively within a global context.
[CORE comment on the project at OR2012]

EDINA has been funded by JISC to support the open research agenda and improvements in research information management. UK RepositoryNet+ is establishing a single, coherent, socio-technical infrastructure to support the deposit, curation and exposure of UK open access research literature by UK institutions and will enable them to operate more cost effectively.

As well as leading UK RepositoryNet+, we are contributing two standalone middleware tools to the components of the infrastructure. The Organisation and Repositories Identification (ORI) tool is designed to identify academic organisations and their associated repositories, while Repository Junction Broker (RJ Broker) will handle the deposit of research articles to multiple repositories. RJ Broker is generating significant attention, with active interest from MIT, Nature Publishing Group and eLife.

An early priority has been the mapping and subsequent validation of the Open Access and Repository landscape, engaging with UK funding bodies, publishers, institutional repository managers and principal investigators. The initial technical infrastructure including the website and helpdesk was built and made public at OR2012. The initial services offering have been selected by JISC and their integration into this infrastructure is underway. These services are: the SHERPA ROMEO registry on publisher copyright policies on self-archiving; the JULIET registry of research funders' open access policies; the IRUS-UK tool for creating, recording and consolidating usage statistics for individual articles using data from institutional repositories; RJ Broker and ORI.

UKOLN's Innovation Zone is investigating and testing potential additions to the UK RepositoryNet+ service portfolio. Throughout 2011-2012, the project has engaged with the institutional repositories community at large though representations at relevant conferences and workshops. Senior members of the community are included in the Project Board and Advisory Board to ensure that the strategic direction and operation of the services meet the desired economies of scale and effectiveness.

The Keepers Registry – information about archiving agencies for e-journals

Thank you for offering this ... It should be very useful to librarians and others concerned about digital preservation of scholarly content
[Survey, 2011]

The Keepers Registry Beta Service, developed from the JISC-funded Piloting an E-journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS) project, provides easily accessible information about which, if any, archiving agency is looking after which e-journal titles, and how. The Keepers are the seven participating archiving agencies that are acting as stewards of digital content. Another two Keepers are scheduled to submit data over the coming months.

Launched in October 2011, the Keepers Registry is a partnership between EDINA and the ISSN International Centre in Paris. The ISSN IC has made available the ISSN Register, which contains bibliographic metadata for all journals that have been assigned an ISSN.

At the time of writing, the good news is that the Keepers are 'preserving' over 17,500 unique Serial Titles – that is, they have reported holding one or more actual volumes. There is some overlap in stewardship across the archiving agencies, which is to be welcomed. However, ISSNs have been issued for 100,000 e-serials, and we cannot yet establish coverage of the 30,000 or so 'scholarly journals' that is sometimes estimated. Moreover, the extent being preserved for a given Serial varies greatly and is far from complete. Good progress is being made and the job of preservation is only part done, but since launch, the Keepers Registry has attracted favourable comment within the UK and internationally.

The Beta service initially launched with functionality to search by ISSN and journal title. This has since been extended to allow browsing by Publisher and Journal Title, and a holdings comparison service in active development. Discussions amongst the archiving organisations have been prompted by participation in the Keepers Registry, with calls for greater social media functionality in order that it can be operate as a 'safe places network', enabling exchange between those organisations with archival intent, and also assisting engagement with others who care about the issues involved: not only the titles and extent of volumes actually preserved, but also the variants in technical approach, business model and the terms of availability for triggered content.

PECAN – quality entitlement information

There is institutional uncertainty around the extent of entitlement, at a time where budgetary pressures are forcing institutions to consider cancellation of subscriptions and institutions are trying to identify what content they may lose access to. Strong demand exists for quality entitlement information, especially as many institutions are undertaking print disposal exercises and wish to have authoritative assurance of perpetual access before disposing of content.

Phase 2 of the JISC-funded Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of Access via NESLi2 (PECAN) project, undertaken in partnership with JISC Collections, developed a prototype Entitlement Registry. This is a subscription database 'with history', which supports assertions of rights of access by researchers/students to back issues in the event of journal cancellation. Recommendations for taking this work forward have been made to JISC.

GoGeo and ShareGeo – Sharing and reusing derived geospatial data

Thanks to GoGeo and ShareGeo, I was able to locate ('discover') two very important datasets for two research studies – which I couldn't locate elsewhere or using Google Search – the latter dataset in particular saved us lots of money because the commercial version of this dataset is quite costly
[Online survey response, 2011-2012]

ShareGeo Open offers the opportunity for researchers and students to find and share geospatial datasets, while the national academic geoportal, GoGeo, harvests metadata records monthly and improves discoverability of datasets within the repository. Because of the specialist nature of the data and careful curation of databases harvested, ShareGeo Open offers users the chance to find important datasets that are not easily located elsewhere. The repository has an advanced map-based search and, with almost 1,000 data downloads per month, is proving a useful companion to institutional repositories. A plugin for the most widely used Geographical Information Systems within UK academia has been created, enabling deposit to take place at the point of data creation. RJBroker will be deployed to ensure that institutional repository managers are alerted when relevant data deposits are made into the geospatial repository.

Geospatial Enabling and Data Infrastructure

Digimap Collections – value added geospatial maps and data services

Simple to use, very straightforward. The level of information provided with each map is brilliant. The service saves hours and hours of time that can be spent much better elsewhere
[Online survey response, 2011-2012]

The Digimap Services provide online access to, and support for, the most comprehensive set of maps and geospatial data available to UK higher and further education. They have now been running for over a decade, and the last year has seen substantial improvements to continue to maintain the high level of service and functionality expected of a demanding and growing user base exceeding 45,000 active users. The geospatial services were the subject of a detailed JISC Portfolio Review during 2011-2012.

During the year, a new Digimap homepage was developed and implemented, the first significant interface update in the last eight years. The new homepage serves as both the login page and as the access to Digimap collections and applications. Launched on 10 July 2012, it provides easy access to the most frequently used applications as well as training and support resources.

A significant improvement to Digimap during the last year was the release of the new data download facility for the OS Collection. Replacing the data-centric facility with one focused on location provides the user with a much easier means of finding and selecting their area of interest. The new facility allows multi-product downloads, previous data versions where available, and simplifies the process of re-ordering different data for the same area. Launched in Digimap OS in November 2011, versions of the new framework will be released for the other Digimap collections during 2012-2013.

Improved annotations in OS Roam were made, with plans for imminent implementation in the other Collections. Several new or improved functions are now available to users, namely:

• save and load annotation sets between sessions;
• import users own annotation data in a range of formats, including CSV, Shape and GPS/GPX where the annotations can be viewed, styled and printed;
• export annotations to a range of formats for use in other software applications;
• and the provision of improved editing tools for changing style, form and text strings of existing annotations.

Helping to enable the UK academic spatial data infrastructure

EDINA has ongoing engagement with the UK Location Programme (UKLP) to further enable the vision of what may be termed the 'UK academic spatial data infrastructure (SDI)', acting within the European Union's INSPIRE Directive. EDINA acts on behalf of JISC and the academic sector in the UKLP, sitting on various working groups: Metadata; Data Publishing Group; Business Interoperability Group, and the Linked Data Group. It also attends the Architecture Interoperability Board (formerly the Location Information Interoperability Board), and contributes as a formal member on the Scottish Government's Spatial Information Board (SIB). EDINA continues to engage and support the sector through awareness raising activities, providing advice on INSPIRE, and promoting UKAMF/Shibboleth for the protection of Open Geospatial Consortium web services.

The JISC Geospatial Engagement and Community Outreach (GECO) project provided support for the JISC-funded geospatial projects strand, including 12 projects around the UK. The team provided support, training and expert advice to staff across these projects to enable them to blog and amplify their work effectively. It also employed liveblogging, twitter, image sharing, video and audio to capture the eight events associated with the project. Feedback to these social media materials was excellent, increasing the impact of relatively small events and making connections far beyond the geospatial programme.

Geo support for resource discovery at EDINA

EDINA services GoGeo, GeoDoc, ShareGeo Open and Unlock form key parts of the UK academic SDI. They ensure that geospatial resources can be documented, discovered and reused and that search 'by location' can be provided in other non-spatial JISC collections.

GoGeo provides a focus for educators and learners – to share and obtain geographical data and be supported in a community
[Online survey response, 2011-2012]

In GoGeo and GeoDoc, users can find data, geospatial services and resources, and create and publish standards-compliant geospatial metadata. 2011/12 has seen an increasing number of European member state geoportals become available and consequently, the UK academic sector is now able to use GoGeo to discover a far greater number of geospatial datasets throughout Europe. Together with Geodoc for the creation and publishing of geospatial metadata, GoGeo ensures the UK HE sector can engage with the UK Location Programme and the INSPIRE Directive at the EU level.

UNLOCK is very easy to use and very well documented
[Online survey response, 2011-2012]

In 2011-2012, innovations developed by the Edinburgh Language Technology Group were used within the Unlock Text place-identification web service. With the US-based Project Bamboo digital humanities network, improvements have been made to the usability and flexibility of EDINA's Application Programming Interface (API), enabling other academic networks, e.g. the Pelagios network, to be better supported. The Chalice project, which exposed English place names data as linked data, led to ongoing work with the Centre for e-Research at Kings College London on the Digitisation and Exposure of England's Place-names (DEEP) project, with project data being made available through the Unlock Places API.

COBWEB (Citizen Observatory Web) – crowdsourcing environmental data using mobile devices

EDINA has multiple activities under way to help us understand the consequences of an ever-changing technological environment for our customers. Reaping the benefits of the shift to mobile platforms is a high priority and in 2011 EDINA built a consortium and put a proposal into the EU's FP7 programme. The result is the four-year EDINA-led COBWEB project, scheduled to start in November 2012. COBWEB is a large project which brings together expertise from 13 partners and five countries. We aim to create a testbed environment which will enable citizens living within UNESCO designated Biosphere Reserves to collect environmental data using mobile devices. Information of use for policy making will be generated by quality controlling the crowdsourced data and aggregation with SDI-type reference data from public authorities.

PhoneBooth – knowledge exchange to create an historical archive

EDINA's expertise in geospatial and mobile services is being used by the London School of Economics (LSE) Digital Library in the JISC-funded PhoneBooth project to repurpose existing digitised, library-owned maps and notebooks for delivery to mobile devices and use in undergraduate teaching. The Charles Booth Maps, Descriptive of London Poverty and selected police notebooks, which record eye-witness descriptions of London street-by-street, are used in LSE's London's Geographies taught course. The mobilisation enabled students to consult the historical archive in the contemporary location to which it refers. Further pedagogical impact was delivered through functionality allowing students to bookmark and reference their interaction with the material, which is used as the basis for new forms of assessment. EDINA developed a mobile delivery platform and trained LSE staff in mobile and geospatial technologies, providing foundations for future LSE digital library service developments and sustainability for this work.

Digimap for Schools – online mapping and fun learning resources for teachers and pupils

Easy to use with child friendly graphics and rapid access to maps at a variety of scales. It is fun to 'play with' and the clarity on screen allows detailed analysis

Launched in August 2010, Digimap for Schools is an online mapping service for use by teachers and pupils in schools throughout the United Kingdom. The service is a collaborative venture with OS and JISC Collections for Schools. It offers easy access to a range of current OS maps, including the most detailed mapping available for Great Britain – OS MasterMap – as well as digital versions of OS's famous paper maps, the Landranger and Explorer series. This is the first time that schools have had easy access to national coverage of these datasets.

During 2012 a set of almost 70 learning resources were created by prominent Geography curriculum experts, covering all stages of the primary and secondary curricula. Available for free to download from the Digimap for Schools website and the Times Educational Supplement (TES) website, the resources provide excellent lesson ideas for teachers to consider how to use Digimap for Schools for innovative teaching in the classroom. Proving a popular addition, the resources have been downloaded over 3,700 times from TES since April 2012. Over 760 schools now have a subscription to Digimap for Schools.

Information and Library Infrastructure

SUNCAT – a collaborative national union catalogue of journals and serials

It has a broad scope of materials held, and is very simple to use. I recommend it to students as well as library staff
[Online survey response]

SUNCAT was created as a strategic shared service, hosting aggregated metadata about journals and serials. As the largest UK database dedicated to serials' information, with 86 research and specialist libraries contributing details of their holdings, it saves time for researchers, students and library professionals. Usage has increased dramatically, in particular over the past three years, and the willingness of the Contributing Libraries to engage and continually to maintain their serials information is itself strong evidence of sector interest.

SUNCAT continues to assist the work of the UK Research Reserve (UKRR) by providing information on the serials' holdings of all 29 UKRR participating libraries; the information provided is used to make decisions on the retention or disposal of print journals. In line with its role as a key component of JISC's Information and Library Infrastructure, SUNCAT responds to national and community initiatives such as Discovery and KnowledgeBase+ (KB+). Projects such as PEPRS and PECAN, and now KB+, extend and build upon the SUNCAT team's wealth of expertise and positive relations with significant agencies, for example the ISSN-International Centre.

This year has seen SUNCAT extend its coverage, including geographical spread, by the addition of nine new Contributing Libraries: four HEI and five specialist, with seven making their first contribution to a union catalogue. In line with its role as a JISC library infrastructure component, major advances were made during the year in starting the building of facilities to provide opportunities for global developers to have access to SUNCAT. It is well underway with plans to support wider access to and reuse of the contributed data, where licensing allows, via an API and release of open metadata. Initial trial use of the API is already being made by EDINA itself through the mobile application developed as a service enhancement during 2011-2012.

Whilst all Contributing Libraries are keen to make their metadata open, there are understandable concerns over the intellectual ownership of metadata records supplied by third party organisations and the approach taken was to ask for a licence permitting this to be signed. Five major contributing libraries have signed licences allowing EDINA to make openly available some or all of their contributed data. Work has commenced to transform the records for all these libraries into the Resource Description Framework (RDF). RDF represents knowledge in the distributed world and is the foundation of the Semantic Web. By making SUNCAT serials metadata available in this format, the potential for linking and meshing the data is unleashed.

In addition, in depth analysis of SUNCAT was undertaken during the past year through three published case studies.

KB+ – a shared knowledge base supporting the management of e-resources

HEFCE has provided funding to create a shared service knowledge base, KB+, for UK academic libraries to support the management of e-resources, including publication, licence and subscription management information, usage statistics, alerting services, and workflow management tools. The information provided would also support the PECAN entitlement registry. JISC Collections is leading this work, with EDINA a member of the project team contributing to its development. KB+ is a product of the work SCONUL carried out in 2009 into shared services to support the UK academic community.

EDINA is providing hosting for the KB+ platform and has also been contributing technical expertise through the development of a reporting tool which will allow the UK academic community to display and export publication information.

UK LOCKSS Alliance – a cooperative movement of UK academic libraries

LOCKSS is in-house so in the event of a trigger, we'd have the control to switch it on right at the moment we need it
[Survey response, 2011]

Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) is an international initiative to safeguard scholarly content. Launched in August 2008, the UK LOCKSS Alliance is a cooperative movement of UK academic libraries that are committed to identify, negotiate, and build local archives of material that librarians and academic scholars deem significant. EDINA is leading the provision of support for the UK LOCKSS Alliance and contributes to LOCKSS software development. Activity is undertaken in partnership with the LOCKSS team at Stanford University Library, which leads and supports the global LOCKSS Alliance initiative and overall software development. The UK LOCKSS Alliance works with JISC Collections to build upon community development and NESLi2 and NESLi2-SMP negotiation activity, and is a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition to engage with broader UK policy issues.

Over the past year, UK LOCKSS Alliance activity has focused on improving system functionality and reporting processes. In early 2012, functionality was introduced to integrate the LOCKSS software with leading link resolver software. Libraries can now provide access to ceased or cancelled subscription content through LOCKSS. System managers can now export holdings information in KBART format detailing the titles and volumes that are 'Available', 'Configured' or 'Collected'. This provides libraries with detailed information about the extent of content preserved on their LOCKSS box. In response to member demand, EDINA is leading the implementation of enhancements to the LOCKSS user interface and a public proposal is available describing the planned activity. Finally, a regular news roundup has been established. Published on a six-week cycle, the roundup updates members on recent activity and contains contributions from UKLA members and the development and support teams at EDINA and Stanford.

OpenURL Router – supporting researchers and students to obtain copies of journal articles

It's easy to configure and means that if we change OpenURL service we only need to do the configuration in one place which is very important to us
[Online survey response, 2011-2012]

Many institutional libraries make use of commercial OpenURL resolvers to enable their students and researchers to find and obtain copies of journal articles. The OpenURL Router operates a central registry of these resolvers, with various services that allow requests to be directed to the appropriate resolver for each end user. It continues to have high levels of use in over 100 institutions, and it is used by the Mendeley and Cite-u-Like bibliographic services. As part of Discovery and with JISC project funding, EDINA now also regularly releases open activity data from the service and has developed a prototype article recommender using these data.

Multimedia and Augmented Reality

JISC MediaHub – building digital literacy through multimedia materials

Breadth of content, constant surprises
[Online survey response]

JISC MediaHub was launched as a platform of the JISC eCollections service on 1 August 2011, contributing to a shared and cost-effective UK e-infrastructure for education and research. It offers search and browse of collections of over 500,000 still images, moving images and sound from JISC-licensed collections and metadata linking to freely-accessible and licensed content provided by others. A number of the 10 recommendations made in the final report from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank are supported, including enabling resource discovery of investments made in audio-visual content by JISC, building digital literacy through use of audio-visual materials, and extending awareness of JISC resources.

By the end of August, its first month in service, JISC MediaHub had 112 subscribing institutions. This compares very favourably with its predecessors' first-month performances: Film & Sound Online (2003) had 52; Education Image Gallery (2004) had 16; and NewsFilm Online (2008) had 55. The early uptake of subscriptions was followed by a more usual level of uptake activity, and by 31 July 2012 the total had risen to 164. Authenticated sessions for JISC MediaHub through the year numbered just over 37,000, which also exceeded those generated by the earlier services.

Academic users from subscribing institutions are able to access rare archival content through a user-friendly interface, saving time and money, as the subscriptions are much cheaper than commercial rates from stock libraries. JISC MediaHub also provides access to institutional multimedia collections and community-created multimedia content, and is well embedded in other JISC products. Where feasible, JISC MediaHub searches relevant multimedia collections created by JISC Digitisation programmes; interworks with collections offered by others, e.g. BUFVC; contributes to Discovery; collaborates with JISC Advance; and supports the work of the Strategic Content Alliance.

The JISC MediaHub blog was launched, with 16 posts and over 3600 unique visitors over the last year. The most successful post, prompted by Steven Spielberg's film War Horse, highlighted images which showed the stark reality of life for horses on the battlefront during the First World War.

Innovating Augmented Reality technology in education

[AddressingHistory] ... makes a superb tool for watching the city of Edinburgh develop through the years before your very eyes!
[AddressingHistory blog]

Following on from the JISC Observatory Report in May 2011, EDINA continues to contribute to promoting the use of Augmented Reality (AR) technology in education. As a member of the Programme Committee for the International Augmented Reality Standards Community, Ben Butchart from our geospatial team has contributed to a Glossary of Terms (pdf) to help make standardisation work easier and AR technology more accessible. This work has been subsequently incorporated into the ISO/IEC 23000-14 standardisation effort (Augmented Reality Reference Model- AR-RM).

The JISC-funded project 'AddressingHistory' created an application that shows 18th and 19th century post office directory entries superimposed on maps of buildings they relate to, allowing users for example to connect the faded letters of business signs and advertisements, removed from masonry long ago, to the people and business that once used the buildings.

The 'Building Anatomy' application, developed in conjunction with the Edinburgh College of Art, enables architecture students to superimpose 3-D models on their 2-D architectural diagrams.

Looking forward to next year, a new EDINA project will create an Authoring Tool to make it much easier for educators to create their own smartphone applications, including AR visualisations.

Carmichael Watson – showcasing stories, songs, customs and beliefs in Scotland

EDINA contributed to an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project led by the University of Edinburgh Library. The project digitised the papers of the pioneering folklorist Alexander Carmichael (1832- 1912) of stories, songs, customs, and beliefs from the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland. EDINA designed and developed the website to showcase the papers and related materials, in liaison with the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh. It was launched in June 2011. EDINA has continued to contribute to this project during 2012 as another phase of work is funded.

Access Management

UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research – enabling access to resources

In a JISC-funded project from April 2004 to March 2007, EDINA's Shibboleth Development and Support Service (SDSS) team investigated and put in place the technical components necessary to sustain an initial Shibboleth infrastructure. The UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research (normally referred to as the UK federation) opened on 30 November 2006. Janet – then called UKERNA – managed the federation, with EDINA providing support in all technical aspects.

Now, EDINA and JISC Collections operate the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research (UKAMF) in partnership. It has more than 900 institutional members and is the largest academic federation in the world. EDINA operates the helpdesk for the UK federation, provides support for installation and configuration, and manages the UK federation metadata. The SDSS Expert Group, based at EDINA, provides advice and guidance to the JISC, the UKAMF and the community on identity and access management, and participates as core members in the development of Shibboleth software.

The UK federation Central Discovery Service was significantly improved in August 2011 following a user interface study commissioned by Janet. The Central Discovery Service is part of the user login process and its purpose is to determine the host institution of the user so that they can be redirected to the correct identity provider. It uses information such as logos and text contained in the UK federation metadata to provide a cleaner and easier to use login process. 500,000 logins go through the discovery service each month.

The UK federation has developed a Shibboleth IdP extension that lets the identity provider release an attribute that is dependent on the user's IP address. An example of how this could be used would be where a resource licence has different terms for on-site and home use, such as access allowed only when supervised by a teacher in school. The Shibboleth IdP extension would allow the resource provider to prevent a user accessing the content when outside a school.

An access management inter-federation pilot with the Irish federation Edugate has been a success. Inter-federation involves combining metadata from one federation with metadata from another to create a new metadata aggregate containing identity providers and service providers from both federations. This allows service providers to authenticate users from identity providers in a different federation. The pilot is now in operation and all of the issues identified as part of testing have been addressed.

Research Data Management Infrastructure

MANTRA – self-paced learning about research data management

I don't think there is another comprehensive RDM primer like MANTRA? It's been V[ery] useful...
[Iridium project comment on Twitter]

The Research Data MANTRA course is an open, online training course intended for self-paced learning by PhD students and early career researchers or by anyone interested in learning more about research data management (RDM). It is available from the EDINA home page or for download as openly licensed re-usable learning objects from Jorum. It was developed by the Data Library team at EDINA in collaboration with the Institute for Academic Development, University of Edinburgh, and funded by JISC.

Since its launch in autumn 2011, MANTRA has attracted over 5,000 unique visitors and received praise from students and staff at Edinburgh and other UK institutions. The team has been contacted by institutions outside the UK that use or point to MANTRA for training, or plan to do so, and there are plans to translate it into Spanish. MANTRA was chosen as Jorum's featured resource in April 2012 and it has been referenced in about a hundred tweets since its launch. During June-July 2012, the JISC Iridium project published four blog posts consisting of detailed, positive feedback from postgraduate students who worked through the MANTRA materials.

The User Experience

Sharing and reusing open educational resources

EDINA is committed to providing open resources to assist lecturers and students. During the past year:

• Introductory videos were produced for SUNCAT, Digimap OS, GoGeo, Statistical Accounts of Scotland, UK LOCKSS Alliance and Unlock. Each video represents an interview with an EDINA expert who explains the basic aspects of each service, before explaining the potential benefits and impact they make. The videos are available on the EDINA Impact page as well as on the EDINA YouTube channel and have been viewed nearly 1,500 times.
• Fourteen short video tutorials covering various technical aspects of the Digimap Collections were uploaded onto the EDINA Digimap YouTube channel and were made available from the help and support area on the Digimap home page. They have had nearly 20,000 views since their launch.
• The first component of a suite of online learning materials for Digimap OS (select 'Explore Resources') was launched in March 2012. The three units cover the basics of geospatial data and have been viewed over 500 times.

EDINA's Social Media Officer, Nicola Osborne, contributed a chapter on social media and other online support for students in elearning contexts to User Studies for Digital Libraries Development (Milena Dobreva, Andy O'Dwyer and Pierluigi Feliciati, User Studies for Digital Libraries Development, Facet Publishing, 2012).

Developing mobile applications

EDINA is going mobile, in line with our users' needs and expectations. Over the last year we have developed multiple clients for iPhone and Android handsets, combining our existing services with the opportunities afforded by internet equipped, GPS enabled smartphones. Mobile apps have been developed for the JISC MediaHub and SUNCAT services which allow users to access these services 'on the go' and take advantage of location aware functionality, such as limiting search results to those with a geographic relevance near to their current location. Digimap-related apps have also been developed to enable students to use and annotate OS maps on mobile phones and to download maps for fieldtrips. These service enhancements will be rolled out over the next few months.

Help and support

During 2011-2012 EDINA continued to extend its help and support for services. The following are some highlights:

• We have continued to run numerous training webinars and workshops; two webinars for JISC MediaHub had over 80 bookings from existing JISC MediaHub site representatives or information professionals from potential new subscribing institutions.
• We organised a very successful, well attended Geoforum in York during June 2012. The free all-day event was aimed at lecturers, researchers and support staff who promote and support the use of Geo-services at their institution and provided updates on current geospatial developments at EDINA. It was also an opportunity for users and site representatives to give feedback on services and to discuss geospatial issues with the staff. The event offered the chance to communicate and reach out to our site representatives, users, data providers and other stakeholders, and social media amplification was an important part of the event.
• The first edition of the Digimap newsletter was sent as an HTML e-mail through the JISC mail service. The newsletter resulted in a significant peak of user traffic to the Digimap Blog with a total of over 5,000 unique visitors during 2011-2012.

Social media outreach and knowledge exchange

EDINA undertakes outreach work in a number of areas, including sharing our expertise in using social media. Some of the highlights of our year include:

• We ran a Social Media and Academic Panel Session with Edinburgh Beltane as part of Social Media Week in Glasgow. This session focused on the opportunities for using social media in academia, particularly for public engagement where collaborating and communicating research to the wider audience can create greater social impact.
• We developed and adapted our staff advice for using social media, providing the basis for the University of Edinburgh's Social Media Guidelines.
• Our Social Media Officer regularly advises those in HE/FE and beyond through various conferences and presentations. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Open Research Software, which features peer-reviewed papers describing research software with high reuse potential.

Usability Service Enhancements to Digimap (USeD)

The complexity of the underlying data in Digimap OS Collections, the heterogeneous nature of the user base and the broad range of digital literacy across this user base poses both significant usability and learning challenges. To address this 'spatial literacy' gap and to ensure the new Digimap data download facility interface was more intuitive and met the needs of our users, the USeD project was funded by JISC.

EDINA staff conducted user focused research to develop stereotypical 'personas' across the spectrum from novice to expert. A persona is a hypothetical individual representing a discernible character facet of real users. The personas were used to steer the redesign of the interface. An external usability expert was engaged to work with EDINA and give advice on best practice. Extensive usability testing was carried out, and fed back to the EDINA designer and the service engineers to iteratively develop a new interface. Launched in November 2011, the new data download interface has received very positive feedback.

Assessing user satisfaction

EDINA has investigated how to gain more from the very positive comments it receives in annual user satisfaction surveys. The analysis of 7,500 responses to the 2011-2012 user satisfaction survey shows that an overwhelming majority of users found our services easy to use, saved them time or enabled them to do what would otherwise have proved impossible. Additional questions were asked this year to gather user requirements. Digimap Collection users were asked to rank a range of future potential developments; likewise, SUNCAT users were asked what could be improved in SUNCAT. As part of our push for quality improvement, we also opted to examine in more detail what negative feedback we could find. Both exercises were very useful and will inform future service development.

Customer/Stakeholder Experience

Calculating value for money

We wanted to take a look at some of our services to see how much they offered our customers in terms of value for money.

In February 2012, a monetising exercise was carried out for the Digimap Collection services. The conservative estimate of the aggregate value of data downloaded and maps printed during 2010-2011 was £24.8 million, on top of the imputed value of providing a world-class online mapping service for 108 universities and 40 colleges. We plan to send organisation-specific estimates to each site representative, as this calculation will be an invaluable tool for the subscribing institutions to demonstrate value for money.

Subscriptions to databases held in SUNCAT would cost each institution over £4 thousand: SUNCAT obtains the data for all at just under £17 thousand in toto.

Improved technical reliability

EDINA infrastructure benefits from synergy with the University of Edinburgh. The University possesses a large scale computing infrastructure and leveraging marginal use of that is cost effective for JISC and our customers. The University and EDINA continue to monitor the comparative cost of external cloud hosting and currently University hosting remains significantly less expensive.

EDINA has recently participated in a joint procurement with the University to secure upgraded Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure and an updated SAN has now been installed. This will result in significant cost savings and performance improvements and provides a vendor-neutral and long-term storage solution. EDINA also shares backup infrastructure with the University. The current hardware is due to be upgraded or replaced over the coming 18 months.

Capacity as a JISC-funded academic data centre

EDINA enables JISC to address sector priorities and support national strategies. Its primary advantages lie in economy of scale and having a critical mass of skill/talent, utilising a prominent university's infrastructure and broader support network, yielding cost effective and highly competitive products at marginal cost. Running high demand services against Service Level Agreements with innovation challenges develops well rounded engineering capability and the valuable capacity to transition projects to services, normally a high risk activity.

EDINA provides high quality, cost-effective helpdesk, training and support services, and has a reputation for excellent user support, which we seek to improve each year. Various staff members at EDINA are recognised nationally and internationally as experts in their fields and have links with many important organisations. Co-development of software as pressure grows on institutions to maintain developers is an important capacity that JISC can offer the community via EDINA. Capacity is required to undertake innovation, knowledge exchange and service enhancements that continue to meet the requirements of the community.