Dear friends,
I am forwarding this to the list as for some reason the
JISCMAIL software intercepted it thinking it might be spam.
Apologies to Barbara!
Tinho
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>From: A Paul R Cooper <[log in to unmask]>
At 16:22 20/02/01 +0000, you wrote:
>Dear List,
>A small philosophical point!
>There seems to be an inbuilt assumption in offerings from
EDINA, Digimap and many others that UK academics will only
be interested in UK data.
<snip>
>All the best
>Paul Cooper

Dear colleagues
I am copying EDINA's response to Paul's email to the list...

Dear Paul,
Thanks for your email. I don't believe that EDINA has an in
built assumption that UK academics will only be interested
in UK data, rather that the current situation reflects the
policy of those who fund the purchase of data sets for use
within UK academia.

Both JISC and CHEST, the two organisations responsible for
the majority of deals for the supply of data, need to be
shown that there will be a significant demand for a data
set before they negotiate a deal with a data supplier. In
doing this, they take into account the cost of the data
relative to the level of interest in the data: together
these influence the subscription that will have to set in
order to recover the cost of the data. If the cost of the
data is high with few potential users, the subscription
rate is likely to be accordingly high which in turn usually
means that few institutions will subscribe. JISC's stated
policy is that a proposed information resource, which is of
value only to members of a small user group, will generally
be excluded unless it can form part of a wider common
framework within the national data collection scheme. The
OS data accessible through Digimap is currently in use
within 50 institutions and by 4500 users. (Demonstrating to
JISC the potential for wide uptake was one of the main
reasons JISC agreed to purchase OS data.) I cannot off the
top of my head think of any non-UK spatial data set that
would have that (potential) level of usage for JISC or
CHEST to consider negotiating a deal for access to it.

Having said this, if a non-UK data set exists in which
there might be significant interest, JISC could be
approached about it. The data survey we are undertaking
currently is one way of finding out what demand exists for
different datasets. I therefore hope you will take the
opportunity of stating your non-UK data needs formally when
you receive a questionnaire from the Digimap Project. We
hope the results will influence the future provision of all
geo-spatial data (not just UK) to UK Higher Education
Institutions. A short version of the questionnaire was
circulated through lis-maps and a number of other mailing
lists. A longer version will be dispatched on 1 March to
those who indicated that they would be prepared to provide
more detailed information. I will make sure you get a copy.

Regards
Barbara

Barbara Morris
EDINA, Data Library
Main Library Building
University of Edinburgh
George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LJ
Tel. Direct line: 0131 651 1239; Fax.: 0131 650 3308
URL http://edina.ed.ac.uk/
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