Home University of Edinburgh Library Essentials
April 5, 2026
DataVault user roles let you share access to archived data
The Edinburgh DataVault is a secure long-term retention solution for research data.
Thanks to the hard work of our software developers in the Digital Library and EDINA, the Edinburgh DataVault now facilitates five different user roles. This means busy PIs can delegate the work of depositing and retrieving data, to members of their team or other collaborators within the University. It also allows PIs to nominate support staff to deposit and retrieve data on their behalf, or grant access to new members of their team.
Diagram representing a PI and two postdocs using the roles of Owner and Nominated Data Manager to share access to data in the DataVault
There are five user roles:
- Data Owner
Usually the Principal Investigator. Can add/remove other users to their vault(s). - Nominated Data Manager (of a given vault)
Can view and edit metadata fields, deposit data and retrieve any deposit in the vault. May add/remove Depositors to the vault. - Depositor (of a given vault)
Can view the vault contents, deposit data and retrieve any deposit in the vault. - School Support Officer
Acting on behalf of the Head of School, may view all vaults and associated deposits belonging to the School. - School Data Manager
Assigned only with the express permission of the Head of School, may view, deposit into and retrieve data from any vault belonging to the School.
Full details of the permissions associated with each role:
Roles and permissions
Support staff who need to view reporting data for their School, or admin access to their School’s vaults, should attend our training – Edinburgh DataVault: supporting users archiving their research data.
Further information on why and how to use the DataVault is available on the Research Data Service website:
DataVault long-term retention
If you have any questions about using DataVault please don’t hesitate to contact the Research Data Support team at data-support@ed.ac.uk.
Pauline Ward, Research Data Support Assistant
Library and University Collections
@PaulineData
New research data management tool on one-year trial: protocols.io
Information Services aims to offer a research data service that meets most of the data lifecycle needs of the majority of UoE researchers without interfering with their freedom to choose tools and technologies which suit their work. In some cases cloud tools that are free to individual users are offered commercially as enterprise versions, allowing groups of researchers (such as lab groups) to work together efficiently.
The service’s steering group has agreed a set of criteria to apply when a tool is put forward by a research group for adoption. The criteria were developed after our two-year trial of the electronic lab notebook software, RSpace, and have been most recently applied to protocols.io. The protocols.io trial begins this month and will run for one year. An evaluation will determine whether to continue the enterprise subscription and how to fund it.
protocols.io is an online platform for the creation, management, and sharing of research protocols or methods. Users can create new protocols within the system, or upload existing methods and digitise them. Those with access to a protocol can then update, annotate, or fork it so that it can be continually improved and developed. There is interoperability with Github and RSpace, and long-term preservation of protocols through CLOCKSS.
Users can publish their protocol(s) making them freely available for others to use and cite or, with the enterprise version, keep them private. The tool supports the Open Science / Open Research agenda by helping to ensure that methods used to produce data and publications are made available, assisting with reproducibility.
Subscribing to the University plan will allow research groups to organize their methods and ensures that knowledge is not lost as trainees graduate and postdoctoral students move on. There are currently over 70 University of Edinburgh researchers registered to use protocols.io. You may follow these instructions to move your current protocols.io account to the premium university version. For more information contact data-support@ed.ac.uk.
Kerry Miller and Robin Rice
Research Data Support team
How to be Popular (in Edinburgh Research Explorer)
Edinburgh Research Explorer • www.research.ed.ac.uk
These are conclusions from a survey of the Top 100 MOST POPULAR downloads from Edinburgh Research Explorer in August 2019, it contains some VERY obvious biases and doesn’t reflect the breadth, depth, or usefulness of the repository as a whole; and shows that whilst OPEN ACCESS can reach a wider audience, it can also be ignored by a wider audience.
1. STEER CLEAR OF SCIENCE
Research items from science-related schools made up 18% of the Top 100, dropping to 12% in the Top 50 and 0% in the Top 10.
2. DON’T COLLABORATE
With each additional author, the number of items and the average number of downloads decreased.
3. YOU DON’T HAVE TO WRITE IN ENGLISH, BUT IT HELPS
In the Top 100, one item was written in Italian, the remainder in English:
that was also one of only five items that month, that failed to find an audience outwith the UK.
4. GO OPEN-ACCESS
8 of the Top 100 items didn’t offer Open-Access Permissions, they averaged 25% fewer downloads than the overall average.
LLC related database trials
There are quite a few database trials going on at the moment that are relevant to subject areas in the LLC School. The trials can be accessed from the Library’s E-Resources Trials website.
On trial: Bayeux Tapestry Online
*The Library now has access to this resource. Find out more at New to the Library: Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition.*
Thanks to a request from staff in HCA I’m pleased to let you know the Library currently has trial access to the Bayeux Tapestry Online from Scholarly Digital Editions. This online version allows you to scroll through the entire Tapestry and zoom in on the Tapestry to the level of the actual weave.
You can access from the E-resources trials page.
Access is available on and off-campus.
Trial access ends 31st December 2019. Read More
On trial: Medical Services and Warfare
Further to a request from staff in the Medical School the Library currently has trial access to the digital primary source database Medical Services and Warfare from Adam Matthew. This resource tells the story of medical advances during warfare from the mid-nineteenth century to the outbreak of the influenza epidemic in 1918 and the discovery of penicillin in 1927.
You can access Medical Services and Warfare from the E-resources trials page.
Access is available on and off-campus.
Trial access ends 16th December 2019.
Medical Services and Warfare allows you to explore multiple perspectives on the history of injury, treatment and disease on the front line. Chart scientific advances through hospital records, medical reports and first-hand accounts, and discover the evidence of how war shaped medical practice across the centuries. Read More
On trial: London Low Life
*The Library has now purchased access to London Low Life. This can be accessed via Digital Primary Source and Archive Collections or the Databases A-Z.*
Thanks to a request from a HCA student the Library currently has trial access to the digital primary source database London Low Life from Adam Matthew. This wonderful digital collection brings to life the teeming streets of Victorian London, inviting you to explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of the nineteenth century’s greatest city.
You can access London Low Life from the E-resources trials page.
Access is available on and off-campus.
Trial access ends 16th December 2019.
From salacious ‘swell’s guides’ to scandalous broadsides and subversive posters, the material sold and exchanged on London’s bustling thoroughfares offers an unparalleled insight into the dark underworld of the nineteenth century city. Children’s chapbooks, street cries, slang dictionaries and ballads were all part of a vibrant culture of street literature. Read More
Research Data Service achieves ISO 27001 accreditation for Data Safe Haven facility
Following a five day on-site audit by Lloyd’s Register, the Information Security Management System (ISMS) which forms the basis for the Data Safe Haven facility for University of Edinburgh researchers has been officially certified to the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 standard. In a few weeks we will receive a certificate from UKAS (United Kingdom Accreditation Service).
The Data Safe Haven (DSH) team, comprised of members of Research Data Support in L&UC and Research Services in ITI, and with input from the Information Security team and external consultants, has been working toward certification since 2016. The system, designed by ITI’s Stephen Giles, has been extensively and successfully ‘white box penetration tested’ by external experts, one of the many forms of proof provided to the auditor. (White box means the testers were given access to certain layers of the system, as opposed to a black box test where they are not.)
The steel cage surrounding Data Safe Haven equipment in one of the University data centres.
In addition to infrastructure, a proper ISMS is made up of people who perform roles and manage procedures, based on organisational policies. The Research Data Support team work with research project staff to ensure their practices comply with our standard operating procedures. The ISMS is made up of all the controls needed to ensure that it is sensibly protecting the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of assets from threats and vulnerabilities. Over 150 managed and versioned documents covering every aspect of the ISMS were written, discussed, practiced, reviewed and signed off before being examined and questioned by the auditor.
The auditor stated in the final report, “The objectives of the assessment were achieved and with consideration to any noted issues or raised findings, the sampled areas of the management system demonstrated a good level of conformance and effectiveness. The management system remains supportive of the organisation and its business and service management objectives.” On a slightly more upbeat note, Gavin Mclachlan, Vice-Principal and Chief Information Officer, and Librarian to the University said by email, “Congratulations to you and the whole team on the ISO 27001 certification. That is a great achievement.”
The Digital Research Services programme has invested in the Data Safe Haven to allow University researchers to conduct cutting edge research, access sensitive data from external providers and facilitate new research partnerships and innovation. Researchers are expected to include Data Safe Haven costs in funded grant proposals to achieve some cost recovery for the University. To find out if your project is a candidate for use of the Data Safe Haven contact data-support@ed.ac.uk or the IS Helpline.
Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support
L&UC
Incunabula: Fables, foliage and a female Pope
Hortus sanitatis, Fol.101 verso
I was lucky enough to be involved in the Incunabula pilot project here in the Digital Imaging Unit. This project helped to create a digitisation workflow for Incunabula collection items using the i2S CopiBook v-shape scanner. These bound volumes are printed using a variety of early printing methods including wood block printing resulting in beautifully crafted and illustrated objects. This project afforded an opportunity to get up close and personal with these beautiful and often entertaining treasures, that were quite literally being brought into the light through the capture of images.
Beginning of a new ERA
We are pleased to announce that the Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) has recently had a lot of work done to improve it’s looks, add new functionality and clean up some of our collections data.
For those of you who are not familiar with ERA it is is a digital repository of original research produced at The University of Edinburgh. The repository contains documents written by, or affiliated with, academic authors, or units, based at Edinburgh that have sufficient quality to be collected and preserved by the Library, but which are not controlled by commercial publishers. Holdings include around 27,000 full-text digital doctoral theses, 1,500 masters dissertations, and numerous other project reports, briefing papers and out-of-print materials. In October 2019 we recorded 223,000 visitors to ERA who downloaded 51,984 items.
Details of some of the improvements are listed below:
| Software upgrade | The DSpace platform was upgraded from version 4.2 to 6.3 | ||
| Face lift | Visual redesign and styling ERA to make it more appealing | ||
| DOI allocation | New functionality to assign DOIs to deposited items | ||
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New domain |
New URL => era.ed.ac.uk | ||
| Fix subject terms | Change scanning metadata information to be stored in dc.relation.ispartof and not dc.subject. |
✔ |
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| Log-in expiry time | Set login expiry time to an hour. |
✔ |
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| Date-format | Go from yyyy-mm-dd to dd-mm-yyyy |
✔ |
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| UX improvements |
Move Edit Item button up, to the top of the bar, customise drop down list to have most used elements at the top. |
❌ |
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| Default language boxes | Give “en” as default to language boxes. |
Of all the new improvements I am most excited about the new functionality to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to items deposited in ERA. All new items will be automatically assigned a DOI, and we will investigate how to do this for the rest of the nearly 35,000 items already online.
Collections
Hill and Adamson Collection: an insight into Edinburgh’s past
My name is Phoebe Kirkland, I am an MSc East Asian Studies student, and for...
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Projects
Cataloguing the private papers of Archibald Hunter Campbell: A Journey Through Correspondence
My name is Pauline Vincent, I am a student in my last year of a...
Archival Provenance Research Project: Lishan’s Experience
Presentation My name is Lishan Zou, I am a fourth year History and Politics student....