JISC

Speaker: Susan Copeland,  Robert Gordon University

The International Context

Susan outlined two major initiatives:

NDLTD

Networked digital library of theses and dissertations – dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use and dissemination and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations.

The site gives examples of theses that have won awards.

North America based, and bias, includes publishers as well, but also includes representatives from Asia and Australia who are very active.  Susan herself is on the board of directors.

Its Annual conference is to be held mid-June in at UppsalaSweden, the conference has been going since 1998.

E-theses working group

GUIDE G uiding Universities In Doctoral E-theses

  This is European in emphasis – to stimulate European doctoral electronic thesis developments.  It is a 2 year programme.   Its aims are to:

• Share good practice
• Encourage compatibility
• Identify where joint activity would be beneficial
• Avoid duplication of effort
• Develop an  interoperability demonstrator
• Produce a suite of web pages

 

Speaker: Paul Ayris, UCL

 DART Europe Project

Current members are UCL, Oxford, Trinity College Dublin, and DartingtonCollege

There was an initial technical collaboration with Proquest – which has now ceased.

Its overall aim is to work together for the discovery, retrieval and use of research theses from European universities.  It is underpinned by the Berlin declaration on open access.  It is community-led and owned,

Aims:

• Open access at point of use
• Development of a business model

Phase One a chievements so far:-

DEEP Portal established www.dart-europe.eu

Maintained by UCL

Currently harvesting records daily from UCL, Catalan universities and Nordic countries

About to harvest German theses metadata and Irish Universities data

It aims to work at consortium or country level – this makes the harvesting process easier.

There are current C 10,000 records

It has not yet achieved added-value services – too big a scale of exercise for this to happen yet.

Phase 2 2007 -

Aims:

• To enlarge partnership and collaborations
• To place special emphasis on EU accession countries
• To seek endorsement from LIBER (European Consortium of Research Libraries)
• To investigate issues around the long-term sustainability of partnership and portal
• Likely to bid to fund multi-lingual developments in the portal

A project website has been launched at www.dartington.ac.uk/dart/

Questions

On the portal, does one record = one theses?

Yes

Does the Portal store the actual thesis?

The Portal stores metadata – it links to the full text in the holding institution

Is there still an issue regarding rights on this?

Rights can vary institution to institution – they reach the agreement with the submitting student

Is a Deposit tool being developed?

Regrettably work on this has stopped since the partnership with Proquest ended

What Metadata standards are being employed?

The Standard Dublin Core fields are being used

 

Speaker: Gerard Van Estienne SURF Foundation

Doctoral e-Theses: The Promise of Science Project

www.darenet.nl/promiseofscience

  Background:

Approximately 2600 – 2900 doctoral theses are submitted in the Netherland each year. Th ey are not typically student work; they are more likely to be employed on a temporary assignment, for an average of 5 years.

Aims:

The aim of the project was to create a national e-theses gateway with 10,000 theses. By the end of 2006 more than 90% of all new theses will be digitally and open-access available. The project has fulfilled its first aim – there are now 14,000 theses available, the full text version is available on an open-access basis.  The majority are from the last 20 years.

Lessons Learned:

• The 90% target was too ambitious
• Interoperability between differing institutional systems has been difficult
• Many institutions have no copyright policy for theses –this project has started this process off
• A mandatory policy for archiving has been achieved in 6 out of 13 universities
• Most importantly, the process has become part of the repository infrastructure in the Netherlands

Gerard also briefly mentioned another project:

The Europe e-theses demonstrator

T his is a collaboration of 5 universities, SURF and JISC

Lessons Learned from this project were:-

• Qualifications of doctoral these differ
• Language and metadata
• Document types need standardisation
• Simple DC is not enough

Questions

Have there been any problems with embargo?

No, in the Netherlands paper copies of theses are freely available so it was easy to persuade institutions that the digital copy was no different!  There were however some issues where publishers where thesis content was used in published papers.