As blogged about last month, we have been working on a new Digimap registration system which will be released next Wednesday (28th January) The current registration system has been in place for over ten years. It has served us well, but it is now rather dated especially because users have to wait for their registration to be manually approved and processed overnight. The new registration system allows users to get instant access to Digimap. This will be a significant improvement and help those students that leave their Digimap coursework a bit late! At least now they will be able to get access quickly and easily (unfortunately we can’t guarantee they’ll get the work submitted on time though!) Detailed help pages will be available from Wednesday, once the release has been completed and Digimap is available to users. To help prepare site reps and support staff for the change, here is an overview of the registration process.   Registering with Digimap Registration will now be an automated two-step process. Users will supply their details to register and then they must activate access to collections by agreeing to the individual licences. After logging into Digimap to start, users will be presented with the registration form to enter their name, email address, department, status and where they heard about Digimap. After hitting the submit button, users will be sent an email with a link to verify their account.  Once they have successfully verified, they will be directed back to the Digimap homepage, where they then complete the next step of activating collection access. Agreeing to licence for Digimap collections (activating access) After verifying their email address, users will need to agree to the licences for each of the specific Digimap collections that they wish to use, this is done through the licence agreements page. Users will only be able to agree to licences for the collections that their institution subscribes to.  Once the user has agreed to the licence(s) and hit the confirm button, they will have access to those Digimap collections. If the process is completed in one go, it takes no more than a few minutes.  Much quicker than the current system! Existing users Existing users will not notice any change unless they have not been active in a collection for more than 12 months.  Access to a collection expires after 12 months of inactivity.  If that’s the case, they will be prompted to accept the licence when they try to access an application in that collection.  Generally though, if someone has not accessed a particular collection for more than 12 months, we don’t expect they will activate access and therefore will not notice any change with the new system.  Access to active collections will carry on as normal. If you have any questions or comments, please contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk