Introduction to Edinburgh University Data Library and national data services

Editor's Notes

1. Apps Div – developing computer applications and bespoke computing tool solutions for the university as a whole IT infrastructure – Networks, Audio-visual support, telephony/ISDN connectivity
2. One was because disk storage was a scarce and expensive resource. Researchers wanted and petitioned for centrally-managed university wide provision of access to large-scale datasets, typically the decennial population censuses for Scotland, the annual agricultural censuses for England & Wales and for Scotland, the General Household Surveys and a range of digitized boundaries being used in what was still path-breaking ways to do computerized mapping.
3. Reference interview
4. GEO-REFER – geographical referencing resources for social scientists, Go-Geo!, ESRI Virtual Campus plus Macro and Microdata teaching resources
5. Security, backing up, data storage, data documentation and metadata, file formatting, versioning, preservation and sharing, copyright and ethical concerns, IPR etc
6. Research Data MANTRA is an online, self-paced course developed by the Data Library with IAD for University PhD students. There are eight interactive learning units with pictures, video clips and quizzes, as well as four data handling practical exercises with open datasets for use in R, SPSS, NVivo and ArcGIS. Increasingly, research funders are requiring good data management practice for the research they fund. Data management skills will help you organise and document your data, keep your data safe, make your research more reproducible, and preserve it for future use.
7. The Secure Lab is funded by the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) and enables safe and secure remote access by researchers to data deemed too sensitive, detailed, confidential or potentially disclosive to be made available under standard licensing and dissemination arrangements.
8. GDP, birth rate, illiteracy rates, population, household consumption, external trade indicators, import-export figures, earnings, labour costs, employment, health care expenditure etc Eurostat, IMF, OECD, UN, World Bank etc
9. Thematic user guides – food studies, ethnicity, scotland, introductory guides to using govt surveys for health / crime research user guides for the Beyond 20/20 and CommonGIS, Nesstar WebView, and ESDS Qualidata online data services Statistical software user guides (SPSS, Stata) Dataset guides (as per each of the 4 ESDS areas)
10. British social attitudes survey, annual popuation survey,national food surveys, health surveys ! Eurobarometer, euro social survey / euro election study! GUS, MCS, BHPS! Eurostat, IMF, OECD, UN, ! Annual Survey of hours and earnings via secure data service
11. UKBORDERS Digimap Collection Go-Geo! Agcensus Moving pictures and sound services - EIG, newsFilm Online Plus A&I databases The Depot HILT GetRef LOCKSS PePRS
12. Geology Digimap - largest scale geology data (1:50,000) available with national coverage for the UK, A mid-scale (1:250,000) product with Bedrock and Faults layers, Small scale mapping (1:625,000) for the whole of the UK.
13. SNS will diseminate a range of small area statistics including information on health, education, poverty, unemployment, housing, population, crime and social / community issues at the data zone level and above which support a number of the Governments targets and commitments aimed at closing the gap between disadvantaged areas and the rest of Scotland.