Dissemination & Intellectual Property Rights

(Peter Burnhill, Director, EDINA)

1. Dissemination: Archival Responsibility & Access Arrangements

I have interpreted the term 'dissemination' to imply two related activities. The first is that associated with the archiving, or preservation, of the digitised boundaries. The second is that associated with the availability of digitised boundaries for others to use (secondary use).

1.1 Archival responsibility is important. However, it is not vital: digitised boundaries, especially digitised historical boundaries, can never be more than surrogates; therefore, they can (nearly) always be recreated. True, in the future digitised boundaries may be 'born digital', but for the present, those digitised boundaries which relate to the past are derived from extant 'paper' sources, such as maps.

That said, the exercise of archival responsibility has the potential to be cost-effective for scholarship. If this potential is to be realised, those who create or have charge of a collection of digitised boundaries should ensure that they have the potential to be used by a third party. This means adequacy of documentation (including metadata), and attention to the limitations of format, especially if that implies software-dependence.

1.2 The arrangement made for access is, perhaps, more important -- especially if the purpose really is to be cost-effective with respect to future scholarship. The prospective user needs an easy and convenient means to be able to select a set of digitised boundaries: one defined by geographic extent and by type/ level of geography; and appropriate in terms of precision (and hence size) and format for use in a chosen software package. BORDERS is designed to be such an online access service.

Boundary Outline & Reference Database for Education & Research Studies (BORDERS) had its genesis in (a) frustration, (b) serendipity and (c) opportunity.

a) Frustration: In 1983, I worked with a sociologist/historian (Andrew McPherson) and a geographer/programmer (Cathy Garner) on a project to investigate de jure and de facto school catchments in Fife (part of Scotland) and the comparative effects of school and neighbourhood on pupil performance. For the size and purpose of that single project, too much of the project's resources were used up trying to relate local authority boundaries to the 1981 enumeration districts, and then to the postcodes of school pupils, and then creating and manipulating digitised boundaries, rather than on the statistical analysis. Later in the 1980s, I tried doing the same on a national (Scotland) basis for the demand for higher education, with a student (Steve Soloman) on an MSc GIS course. This too was unfortunately at the 'bleeding edge' and frustrated my purpose.

b) Serendipity: By 1984/5, I had moved to manage what became Edinburgh University Data Library. This provided staff and students at the University with online access to a library of large-scale data -- including 1971 & 1981 census small area statistics, associated digitised boundaries and the Postcode Directory for Scotland. This facility continues to the present day -- see http://datalib.ed.ac.uk for further details. In addition to computer programmers and systems analysts, early staff recruitment included a cartographer/geographer (Ann Carruthers) who was expert at GIMMS and a social historian/demographer (Donald Morse) who was expert in 19th century geo-demographic areas. GIMMS was then the UK geographic mapping package written by Tom Waugh -- who was himself also involved in the preliminary activities at Edinburgh.

c) Opportunity: In 1989/90, the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Information Systems Committee (ISC) of the UK higher education funding bodies were planning how best to purchase and make available the data from the 1991 Population Censuses. The national census office for Scotland (GRO) were planning to repeat their use of unit postcodes as the base for census geography and were also proposing to digitise those small aggregations of dwellings (about 100,000 units, being 18 dwellings per unit, on average) and o release the tables to 'manufacture' higher order boundaries. The national census office for England and Wales (OPCS) adopted a census geography based on electoral wards of local authorities, a coarser geography also yielding about 100,000 boundaries for enumeration districts, later to be digitised by a public/private consortium. The data facility at Manchester secured a large grant to make the census statistics available. The Data Library secured a small ESRC grant for a project to demonstrate the feasibility of an online database facility.

This online database facility for digitised boundaries was designed as an application of ARC/INFO and Ingres, using both Telnet and a (pre-WWW) graphical user interface; the prototype was successfully demonstrated at IASSIST in 1993. The design incorporated a system of geographic reference databases, required for the geo-cross walk across the geographies of common placename, postal system, and administration (electoral or ecclesiastical in character). It also make explicit in the user interface the steps required to define and extract a given set of boundaries. We launched UKBORDERS as an 'unfunded' service in September 1994, winning subsequent funding as a national service by the ESRC and the ISC -- now known as the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) -- from September 1995. Donald Morse managed the national service from its launch, with Alistair Towers providing GIS support.

Further information about UKBORDERS can be gleaned at http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders . Although funding for UKBORDERS was tied up with funding for the 1991 Population Census, opportunity has been taken to add digitised boundaries relating to the 1971 and 1981 censuses, and also to add digitised boundaries from the 19th Century. Now a collection of over 300,000 digitised boundaries, at the heart of UKBORDERS is the system of geographic reference databases.

d) Consolidation: The transition of UKBORDERS from project into service coincided with the designation of the Data Library as a JISC National Datacentre in July 1995 -- with launch of the EDINA national services on 25 January 1996 (Burns Night). EDINA is funded as one of three National Datacentres. Further information about EDINA and about JISC is found at http://edina.ac.uk and http://jisc.ac.uk .

e) Context: Following a series of development projects, EDINA now hosts current Ordnance Survey digital map data for use by staff and students in UK higher education -- further information is found at http://edina.ac.uk/digimap . The digital map data ranges from very fine scale (1:1250) to national rrepresentation. The OS Gazetteer is also hosted. There is related project work : to provide OS mapping from the 1830s to the recent past; to provide aerial photography.

e) Development: Future funding for UKBORDERS is partly dependent upon planning for the 2001 Population Censuses. There is, however, obvious synergy between UKBORDERS and Digimap. The UKBORDERS model could also be extended to become EuroBORDERS should this seem sensible.

f) Availability: Staff and students at about 130 universities in the UK use UKBORDERS. The service is free at the point of use but use is restricted by licence in terms of use and users. First, the data vendors have limited the terms of use to research and teaching purposes only, by individuals from a stated and agreed list of institutions. Each prospective user must indicate agreement by signature to a set of terms and conditions. Further detail is given at http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/how-to-register.html .

It is with a focus on 'Availability' that I will next turn to issues of IPR. A small diversion into current legal developments may be required, together with a sketch of the context provided by our employers (the universities) and by electronic commerce. I will take as read that we all know that data can be copied and that telecommunications challenge territorial laws.


© Peter Burnhill (Edinburgh, May 2000)

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