Paper Abstracts

The role of stakeholders: Electronic Theses and Dissertations submission workflow for the University of Johannesburg - Lazarus Matizirofa (SA)

Introduction

The success and growth of electronic these and dissertations (ETDs) has been noted according to literature sources. A number of universities are encouraging and have in place work flow programmes for the submission of theses and dissertations in digital format. The University of Johannesburg (UJ), one of the largest, multi-campus, residential universities in South Africa, has set its goals to achieve the highest distinction in scholarship and research within the higher education context through the role out of its new generation of scholars. This is clearly defined within the the Postgraduate Centre (PGC)’s purpose and aims to:
• coordinate, extend and enhance the postgraduate support systems;
• assist the University in attracting, training and delivering quality postgraduate students; and
• increase the number of postgraduate students (masters and doctoral).

Aims and Objectives
This paper explores the new University of Johannesburg’s ETD submission work flow since the merger of the three legacy institutions, formerly Rand Afrikaans University (RAU), Technikon Witwatersrand (TWR) and Vista University. It also investigates the contribution to research by postgraduate students, past and current. The paper will further examine the ETD scholarly communication model being applied through the merger of the vocational, technical and research discourses of the new university as it re-invents itself as a masters and doctoral granting university. The role of stakeholders in the ETD work-flow will also be explored and evaluated in order to explain the implementation and management of of UJDigispace, an open access repository, which was established in 2009.

The responsibility of managing and preserving ETDs at UJ sits with the University library (UJLIC) and faculties. There are a number of issues that needs to be addressed before these research outputs are made visible through networks and the Internet. Therefore the paper will further argue that, a project plan which maps out objectives, outputs, processes, responsibilities, time frames and resource requirements for submission and management of ETDs be established.

Data Sources and Methodology
The study forms part of an investigation and strategy to establish a solid ETD submission manual at UJ. Data for this case study will be obtained through interviews of various stakeholders identified by the author. These include inter alia, the faculty research co-ordinators, theses and dissertation supervisors, library staff responsible for ETDs, information literacy, and computer literacy at the library and E-learning instructors at the Centre for Technology Assisted Learning. Desktop research will also form part of the data sources. The research will combine the qualitative and quantitative methods to capitalize strength on each approach and offset their different weaknesses.

Conclusion
The paper will address how UJ can go about with the implementation of its ETD workflow that would promote, stimulate and prepare postgraduate students for academic excellence, support thesis supervisory work and research writing that adhere to international standards of referencing. The overall outcomes are aimed at the university’s ETDs contributing to the global knowledge ecology, fostering its prestige and recognition. It is also high time all South African universities contribute to the International ‘Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations’ (NDLTD).

Intended audience
Postgraduate students, Faculties, Academics, Researchers and Librarians.

Do ETDs Deter Publishers? Does Web availability count as prior publicaton? - Marisa Ramirez, Gail Mcmillan, Joan Dalton, Nancy Seamans and Max Read (US & Canada)

A topic of discussion for well over a decade in the ETD community—in the Graduate School and the Library as well as among the research faculty and their graduate students—has been whether publishers and editors of scholarly journals view theses and dissertations readily available on the Internet and through convenient Web browsers, as prior publications. At the 2001 ETD conference at Cal Tech, attendees heard the results of the first surveys of journal publishers’ and editors’ attitudes towards ETDs. It is fitting that 10 years later and 10,000 miles distant at the 2011 ETD conference in South Africa, we report the latest survey results describing publishers’ and editors’ attitudes toward online theses and dissertations. Attendees will also learn about the similarities and differences between now and then in policies and practices.

At the same time that growing numbers of universities worldwide are requiring ETDs and making the research and scholarship of their graduate students publicly available, many faculty advise their students to restrict online access to their theses and dissertations due to concerns about future publication options. Attendees at this session will be provided with the latest data to address faculties’ cautions and to advance open access at their institutions.

While our data address a documented trend in faculty advising their graduate students to limit access to their ETDs, publishers’ attitudes toward open access online scholarship are important to the higher education community at large, not just to the ETD community. The data are also important to the increasing number of higher education institutions that are hosting digital repositories so that they can demonstrate the academic output of their communities and attract future faculty and graduate students as well as potential funding sources.

The authors of the survey and this paper—from the library and graduate school communities in Canada and the United States—came together as a result of the NDLTD Board of Directors charging them to conduct a new survey and to gather current data from the international scholarly and academic publishing community. The audience for this presentation will benefit not only from learning about the current publication landscape for ETD authors, but from the perspective of two of the authors, Joan Dalton and Nan Seamans, who conducted the first two publishers surveys in 1999 and 2000.

Where Sharing Should Not Go: An Environmental Scan of Originality Assurance Awareness and Efforts to Discourage or Prevent Plagiarism - Charles Greenberg and Austin Mclean (US)

Plagiarism is a significant issue on campuses around the world. Ensuring the originality of PhD dissertations and Master’s Theses has been undertaken using a variety of different means. However, a comprehensive overview of the landscape of originality assurance had yet to be conducted. This paper provides the most current review of the plagiarism issue and how universities are addressing it. Results of an environmental assessment of nearly 300 graduate students, faculty, librarians, and academic administrators are provided along with an overview related to universities’ education of students and faculty about the plagiarism issue. Data from the survey sheds light on both attitudes toward plagiarism and how plagiarism is addressed on a university and classroom basis. In addition to presenting the results of the survey, discrepancies found on a subject basis as well as differences between the groups studied are discussed. Finally, this paper recommends areas for future research.

Electronic Theses and Dissertation in Nigeria University Libraries: Status, Challenges and Strategies - Ifeanyi J Ezema and Cyprian Ugwu (Nigeria)

Theses and dissertations occupy a critical space in the research literature. Globally, they form the bulk of the empirical evidences coming from graduate students of the world universities. Unfortunately, the management, preservation, and dissemination of these very important research evidence in Africa and particularly in Nigeria fall below expectation. For one, theses and dissertation fall within the group of grey literature which many libraries and information centres find difficult to track down, and for another, very few copies are produced and they are usually buried in the libraries of the institution where they are generated. As a result of this, the dissemination of theses and dissertations from Nigeria lack global visibility. Usually, they lack adequate method of preserving them to the extent that even the university libraries loose so many of them to fraudulent library users. This development posses serious challenges to library and information professionals who have the responsibility of preservation, and dissemination of recorded knowledge. The advent of information and communication technology has offered librarians the opportunity of preserving and disseminating of theses and dissertation collections in electronic format known as electronic theses and dissertation (ETD). This idea of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) was first conceived in 1987 by University Microfilms International (UMI) in the United States. The ETD movement to a large extent presents a lot of possibilities and opportunities to the growth and dissemination of scholarly research in Nigeria. The thrust of this paper therefore, is to examine the prospects of electronic theses and dissertation projects in Nigerian university libraries. Specifically the papers intends to
1. Explore the status of ETD project in Nigerians university libraries
2. Examine the prospects of ETD in Nigerian university libraries.
3. Identify the challenges of developing ETD in Nigerian university libraries.
4. Propose strategies for developing ETD in Nigerian university libraries.
The method to be adopted for the study is a descriptive survey research design. Librarians in nine government funded universities in South Eastern Nigeria will make up the population. These universities are University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Enugu State University of Science and Technology, Ebonyi State University, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka, Anambra State University Ulli, Federal University of Technology Owerri, Imo State University, Micheal Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike and Abia State University. The data obtained will be analyzed using mean and standard deviation and will be presented using tables and charts.

Institutional Repositories for Open Access; the Ghanaian Experience - Abednego Corletey (Ghana)

In 2008, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) implemented the first Institutional Repository in Ghana. Six month later and with 560 postgraduate theses entered, KNUST appeared 52nd on the webometrics ranking for 100 best universities in Africa. This success resulted in the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Ghana (CARLIGH) and International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication (INASP) helping four academic institutions to implement repositories. The repositories’ managers promised using it to showcase research from their institutions, starting with graduate theses/dissertations.
Aims: This paper looks at how these repositories have met the challenges of technical support, content provision, qualified personnel, institutional backing, achievements and lessons for other institution thinking IRs
Method: In depth interviews, observations, checks from the websites, reports and secondary documents obtained from the Libraries were used to collect data for the paper.
Result: All four institutions had problems with their repositories. While two were completely out, two were uploading some content but their platform was only visible within the library. The absence of policy legalizing the operation of the repositories made it difficult for the managers to request for equipment, content and qualified staff to run the repositories. Useful recommendations are made for CARLIGH, INASP and other bodies that seek to support such enterprise with resources.

Building Institutional Repositories in KLISC Member Institutions in Kenya: Emerging challenges - Rosemary Otando (Kenya)

The study was carried out at the Kenya Library Information Services Consortium (KLISC) member institutions. The main purpose was to examine and assess the development of institutional repositories (IR) in KILSC member institutions.
The objectives of the study were to examine the extent to which IR is put into actual practice, evaluate role of KLISC in supporting IR and determine barriers and intervention measures to address the problems. The paper provides useful case to other consortia who would like to take initiative towards assisting their members to implement repositories.

The study was carried through survey design and the sample constituted 35 respondents from the 75 KLISC members. Data was analyzed using statistical method and presented using tables, and graphs.

The findings show that despite the challenges, KLISC members are committed to IR development and to succeed in this noble project they require considerable support from KLISC, institutional management, and external organizations.

A comparative overview of the development of the institutional repositories at the University of Cape Town and at the University of Pretoria - Annah Macha and Karin De Jager (SA)

This paper gives an overview of South African Institutional Repositories. The growth of open access institutional repositories has been very remarkable in South Africa. Increasing numbers of institutions in South Africa are starting to implement digital institutional repositories in order to collect, disseminate, manage, preserve, and index the research output created by their communities. For a university, this would include materials such as scholarly publications, before (pre-prints) and after (post-prints) undergoing peer review, and digital versions of theses and dissertations. The Repository might also include special materials such as digital assets generated by and donated to an institution, such as art and a wide range of other image collections. Once digital materials are accepted by an Institutional Repository, the Repository should be able to guarantee access and preservation of the digital data.
South Africa at present has twenty-three Institutional Repositories. The leading example is the University of Pretoria, which helped the Council of Science and Industrial Research to establish its repository in 2007. Other universities are benchmarking from it.This paper will compare the Institutional Repository at University of Pretoria with the development of new Institutional Repository at the University of Cape Town In Pretoria, it was found that for an establishment and implementation to be successful, it depends on a number of factors that will be considered and discussed. An analysis of interviews with key informants from the University of Cape Town will be used to assess the extent to which the Institutional Repository at University of Cape Town is dealing with the identified issues.
The paper will critically discuss the importance and benefits of having an Institutional Repository and explore what the University of Pretoria is doing to produce a successful repository.

Assessing Awareness of Repositories and the Open Access Movement Among ETD Faculty Advisors - Molly Dolan (US)

In 1998 West Virginia University became the second university in the United States to require electronic deposit of theses and dissertations (ETDs) from its graduate student population [2]. With the program in place for over a decade, numerous faculty have been exposed to the process of electronic deposit in their role as faculty advisors to graduating PhD and Masters degree students. WVUScholar, the university’s institutional repository, stores and shares ETDs with the scholarly community at large. Faculty adoption of WVUScholar, however, has been mostly non-existent. With the end goal of increasing faculty awareness of and participation in the repository, the WVU Libraries are conducting a survey of faculty who have acted as advisors to ETD-depositing students. The survey will assess their existing awareness of the repository, its features, open access concepts and principles, and seek to answer the question, "has the ETD program acted as an ambassador of open access to WVU faculty?"

ETD Initiatives in Federal University of Technology Owerri (FUTO): Successes, challenges, prospects - Chinwe Anunobi and Collette Onyebinama (Nigeria)

The paper discusses ETDs initiative in Federal University of Technology, Owerri with particular reference to the use of EndNote software. The successes, challenges and prospects are also discussed. Interviews, observation checklist and analysis of document obtained from the library were used to collect data for the paper. Result shows that the University has migrated from the use of Microsoft word application for the management of ETDs to the use of EndNote which was donated by AAU. Three librarians have attended AAU organized workshops on ETDs. The University has all the basic facilities needed for digitization. The University management has a well developed policy on ETDs. The life cycle of ETDs in FUTO indicated offline CD-ROM submission and a well defined processing workflow for digitally born and scanned ETDs. Access to FUTO ETDs is created through the University library intranet and DATAD online site. The University, faculty, students and library have benefitted immensely from the ETDs Initiative. The initiative is challenged by technological and legal issues as well as those related to electricity, ICT infrastructure and other technical issues. Other developing country universities could borrow a leaf from FUTO approach to getting started with ETDs with a view to attaining great height.

Digitization of Theses and Dissertations: Status Quo India - Mangala Hirwade (India)

India is a major South Asian country, where an array of specialized research institutions, research centres and universities situated in almost all major subject areas.
The Government of India, through its apex bodies in higher education and research, facilitates research fellowships to support students with an aptitude for research. The national agencies such as, University Grants Commission (UGC), Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Department of Science & Technology (DST), Indian Council for Social Science
Research (ICSSR) and other national agencies together support research in India.

The fruits of research from the formal research programmes of conventional universities and academic research institutions in India were under-utilized as the access to theses, dissertations and research reports were very limited to the next generation researchers and scholars. Modern information and communication technology (ICT) acts as an effective intervener for paradigm shifting from closed access theses and dissertations to open access electronic theses and dissertations (ETD). In 2005, the University Grants Commission of India (UGC) drafted a national policy framework entitled “UGC (Submission of Metadata and Full-text of Doctoral Theses in Electronic Format) Regulations, 2005”. This Regulation proposed two sets of planned actions, such as: Creation of Indian National Theses Database (INTED) and Submission of PhD Theses in Electronic Form. Vidyanidhi, INDEST Consortium – An Open Access Advocacy Group, Doctoral Theses Repository in NASSDOC, Shodhganga initiative of INFLIBNET, ETD repository of Thapar University, Indian Institute of Science, National Chemical Laboratory, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, etc. are the major initiatives of digitization of theses and dissertations in India. The paper aims to take an overview of the contents of these repositories and to highlight the problems in self archiving approach of researchers in India.

Creative Partnerships to Advance Graduate Research in the Digital Age - John Hagen (US)

Providing adequate support for graduate students to conduct and complete their research relies upon successfully creating strategically collaborative relationships between graduate schools, university libraries and information technology services. This presentation will offer pathways towards providing more effective support services, outreach and promotion of graduate research at your institution through your electronic thesis and dissertation program.

Learning how to conduct independent research and how to write a thesis or dissertation are part of a graduate student’s capstone experience. As research and publication technologies become more complex, graduate students increasingly need special assistance with aspects of their research as well as distillation of their findings into a thesis or dissertation document that may be beyond the expertise of faculty mentors in their department. Universities need to create better infrastructures to plan, implement, promote and sustain graduate research support services.

Today’s graduate students need to work with electronic research methods, including the acquisition of new information literacy skills, automated citation and referencing techniques as well as incorporating multimedia into the electronic thesis or dissertation. These quickly evolving technologies require students to develop new technical skills and have access to the latest computing resources. Even on campuses where adequate resources exist, students may be unaware of the services available to them. As students create new types of information products, involving not only text but also data sets, images, video, audio, and other digital objects, they need to better understand issues related to standards, preservation, and intellectual property.

Libraries, graduate schools and information technology sectors need to work more closely together to provide the kinds of services that will assist students in working with and developing new types of digital information and objects. Additionally, colleges and universities can better leverage their intellectual property products via their ETD collections to more effectively promote their graduate programs and research output to support recruiting and retention missions as well as to facilitate and maintain research funding opportunities.

This presentation will summarize graduate student support service needs; provide collaborative strategies to work with key players involved in the process to create new services; demonstrate how to create effective promotional outreach and communications to graduate faculty, students and the general public as well as provide examples of services, programs and marketing techniques that are assisting graduate students with scholarly communications in the digital era.

Enhanced Browsing System for Electronic Theses and Dissertations - Venkat Srinivasan, Mohamed Magdy and Edward Fox (US)

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) can be a valuable aid to learning and scholarship. However, current systems that provide access to ETDs only provide a full text and/or metadata based search and browse facility, thereby limiting ways in which users can interact with and make use of such collections.

Long documents like ETDs can be viewed as containing various streams of information - textual content (in chapters, table of contents, etc.), tables, images, references, etc. In addition to presenting the ETD as a whole to the user, we present the various streams of information in a synergistic fashion, in order to enhance browsing and comprehension.

We describe a design and a prototype for an enhanced web based ETD browsing system, called ETD-Enhance. It allows users to browse and interact with various streams of information present in ETDs, in an integrated fashion. To allow this, we have developed tools to extract individual chapters, figures, captions, etc. from these PDF files. For our pilot study, we have prototyped ETD-Enhance on a small collection of ETDs, and have made the prototype available for public viewing and to collect feedback. We plan to research better techniques for extracting different information streams, as well as better support for user interaction, and to extend our work to the entire collection of ETDs.

Examining access by country, language and areas of knowledge - Ana Pavani (Brazil)

This paper addresses the analysis of accesses to an ETD collection whose items are mostly written in Portuguese. It is concerned about examing if Spanish and, specially, Portuguese speaking countries are important readers of the works. This analysis for the whole collection is an extension of a previous work that innovates by breaking the problem in 3 subsets of data – ETDs in Humanities & Theology, ETDs in Social Sciences and ETDs in Science & Technology. The differences among the subsets are quantized and considered, so that accesses can be viewed in this context. This article also updates the index created in the previous work to identify potential readers in countries where either or both languages are official languages. An additional result is the identification of the differences among areas in terms of numbers of ETDs, of partitions of the works and of profiles of accesses.

Data Desiccation: Facilitating long-term Access, Use, and Reuse of ETDs - Daniel Alemneh and Mark Phillips (US)

The successful management of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) requires effort across the entire life-cycle to ensure that ETDs are managed, preserved, and made accessible in a manner that today’s users expect. Given the pressure of reading more in less time, today’s users demand access to various formats regardless of temporal and spatial restrictions and the types of devices used. Digital curation is the active management of any type of digital resource through its entire life-cycle, from creation and active use, to preservation and re-use. ETDs are a highly specialized collection that demands a more specialized treatment and characterization to better capture the semantic relations of the underlying concepts. Over the past year, the University of North Texas (UNT) Libraries have put forth great effort in making digital collections more accessible and useful in research processes. This paper discusses UNT’s ETDs curatorial activities including how ETDs users can benefit from desiccated versions, traditionally discussed only in a digital preservation context.

First a trial balloon, now an established workflow: collecting electronic thesis at the German National Library - Uta Ackermann (Germany)

Since 1998 the German National Library (DNB) has been collecting electronic dissertations and postdoctoral theses. At the beginning of 2011 the total number of collected online dissertations reached the 100.000 mark, which makes it the largest national collection of online dissertations in Europe.
This success could only be achieved by close co-operation with German universities, their libraries, institutional repositories and library service centres. This co-operation was conducted as a string of projects funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and is known as ‘DissOnline’, a name, which has almost become its own brand.
Since 2006, as a result of changes in the law regarding the German National Library, the DNB has faced a much greater task than before: To collect and archive not only all German physical media but all German online publications. Faced with this challenge, the DNB was able to utilise the experience with ETDs gained through the DissOnline project.

Creating a National Electronic Thesis & Disertation Portal in South Africa - Lawrence Webley, Hussein Suleman and Tatenda Chipeperekwa (SA)

A national Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) portal has been developed in South Africa to provide access to a country-specific collection of ETDs and, more importantly, to coordinate, manage, monitor and support the development of ETD programmes at the various universities. This portal required the development of a custom software solution, using a multi-tiered simple architecture of complex components. It is argued in this paper that this tiered architecture, tightly integrated into a commonly-used application/operating system framework, is a good approach to develop such central repository architectures to interconnect into the larger repository ecosystems of NDLTD and similar organisations.

Towards National ETD Database: Responsibilities for the Libraries in Kenya - John Thuku (Kenya)

Reasons for establishing national database of Theses and Dissertations (TDs) generated in Kenya and/or about Kenya has been recognized among the academia, librarians, industry, government and in the media. Among the reasons are control of TDs, enhancing visibility, conservation, reference and online indicator of research within universities in the country.

In the recent past student population doing research in university has increased tremendously however it has been difficult to identify research already undertaken, areas that need further research or that has been over-researched. Most institutions are working towards creating electronic retrieval means and hence a need a professional national electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) database.

Further initiatives are taking place from the various stakeholders that include Kenya Information Preservation Society (KIPS) that update Union list of TDs in Kenya, African based DATAD and individual efforts from librarians and departments. The Kenya Education Network (KENET) has encouraged institutions to develop local content of which TDs is in the priority list of unique national resource.

This paper outlines status at Kenyan Institutions, local and national efforts taking place, lessons learned and concludes with plan of action towards making national database of ETDs that integrates with DATAD.

Thesis and Dissertations Management Overview in Kosovo - Shukrije Rama (Serbia)

Electronic thesis and dissertations, which offer scientific information to students and researchers, are considered currently as a crucial factor that influences the development and the advancement of scientific research. Even though ETD system is growing very fast and it is implemented by many countries, this path in some countries still remains without the essential tools needed to foster innovation in the realm of digitalization.
The aim of the research is to examine the contribution to the field of ETD system in general, presenting its development and benefits, and to compare it with traditional management of these collections in Kosovo and region, which is far from any favorable attitude towards implementation of this system.
The measurable parameters of this study are: examination of the international efforts to implement ETD system within institutions, surveys with university units in Kosovo, interviews with representatives of National and University Library of Kosovo and deans of the faculties of the Public University of Prishtina and interviews with representatives of national libraries of Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro. Other resources will be used if necessary, too.
The research findings indicate that even though ETD system is very useful in the library and university premises, there are still countries or regions that are far from taking any step forward, or they are rather unfamiliar with this concept. Since the process of digitalization of thesis and dissertation is very important and complicated, the management structures of universities and libraries must possess a wide knowledge and a background in information and technology discipline respectively an expertise without which cannot be developed and transmitted the knowledge to the new generations. Those structures must initiate discussions on ETD system among students, reviewers, faculty members, library personnel and other subjects which will be affected directly by thesis and dissertations.

University Digital Scholarship Centers and Support for Graduate Thesis and Dissertation Work - Joan Lippincott (US)

In a growing number of US universities, digital scholarship centers are being developed. Often housed in the library and conceived as collaborations among faculty, librarians, multi-media specialists, and others, these centers provide support for scholarly digital projects, with the emphasis on faculty-led work. This paper will present the findings of interviews with staff of digital scholarship centers in the US and interviews with selected graduate students who are affiliated with the centers. Some questions examined will include: to what degree can graduate students avail themselves of the facilities and services offered (or are they only offered to faculty), what are the services most valued by graduate students, what would they like to see in addition to current offerings, and how did the center assist (or not assist) the students in developing a digital project that would become his or her thesis or dissertation?

Social factors influencing the adoption and development of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) programmes in the Arab Gulf States - Jamal Alsalmi, Chern Li Liew and Brenda Chawner (New Zealand)

This paper presents the findings from a research that explored social factors influencing the adoption and development of ETD programs in the Arab Gulf States. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with representatives of five groups of stakeholders with an interest in the implementation of ETD programmes from five Gulf States universities. Research participants identified a number of social issues that influenced the adoption and development of ETD programmes in the Gulf States. These issues included the influence of other people, such as the influence of peers, the influence of academic supervisors on students’ attitudes; the influence of promotional and advocacy activities on a university community and the influence of seeing other universities already adopting ETD programmes. In general, the research participants perceived the importance of social factors, especially promotional activities, in influencing the adoption and development of ETD programmes in the Gulf States.

The dot on the i: reflections of a postgraduate student and repository manager on the etd process at the University of Pretoria - Elsabe Olivier and Ina Louw (SA)

This paper shares the personal reflections of a postgraduate student and a repository manager on the life cycle of an electronic thesis and dissertation at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. The postgraduate student will reflect on her involvement with UPeTD, the University of Pretoria’s electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) repository – at first to obtain electronic information during her studies, but later in becoming a knowledge creator for other students as well. The life cycle of the dissertation and the thesis for the postgraduate student will be discussed as well as the other benefits as a professional, of having her research available in electronic format in the repository.

The repository manager will discuss the life cycle of the thesis and dissertation at this institution from a manager’s perspective for the past decade. This process involves the Postgraduate officers of the nine faculties and although students may self-archive their ETDs, the manager mainly focuses on mediated submission by two library staff members. The availability of a thesis or a dissertation in a repository is only the dot on the i – it entails an intricate work process for the postgraduate student and repository manager, but they both reap the benefits in the end. The manager will also touch on the future developments for the UPeTD repository and reflect on the envisioned changes to the workflow processes.

VT ETD-db 2.0: Rewriting ETD-db System - Sung Hee Park, Paul Mather, Kimberli D. Weeks, Edward A. Fox and Gail Mcmillan (US)

Aims/Objectives: This paper describes a new version of Virginia Tech’s ETD-db digital library system, ETD-db 2.0. ETD-db 2.0 is a web application with the web pages generated by Ruby on Rails scripts. It continues to work with any database (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, etc.) and is hosted by a web server (e.g., Apache, Tomcat). Objectives of rewriting ETD-db are 1) to improve the original powerful functionalities of current ETD-db, and 2) to provide new reliable and secure features to handle ETD collections.

Methods: We have decided Ruby on Rails, a state of the art agile web development paradigm as our primary web application development framework for the sake of improved maintenance. To strengthen the original functionalities of ETD-db, existing functionalities of the current ETD-db system have been articulated and additional needs also collected to be improved in the requirement specification process. To provide new reliable and secure features, a user group consisting of system administrators, managers, and authors have been interviewed to describe their maintenance/usage experiences. Collected requirements have been analyzed by the use case based requirement engineering approach. According to the functional/non-functional requirements drawn through use case analysis, ETD-db 2.0 prototype have been designed and implemented rapidly and then a test driven development (TDD) approach to ensure safer/reliable codes have been used.

Result: As a result, we have drawn additional safer and more reliable features for a new ETD-db system (See http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/NDLTD/BoD201012/ETDdbVer2Features.pdf). We have the ETD-db 2.0 system prototype, being developed for release in near future. It has integrated a directory system by using a secured LDAP protocol (e.g., OpenLDAP, OpenSSL) to authenticate users. In addition, integration ETD-db 2.0 with the Banner (HR) system is under development to enhance usability. We have chosen more maintainable administrator functions (e.g., several statistics like usage/status report, logging and audit) for a system administrator. For managers, a better approval and release notification method has been exploited. For instance, on approval of ‘unrestricted’ ETDs, emails are automatically generated for authors, committee members, UMI, when appropriate. At the time of automatic release of a ‘withheld’ or ‘restricted’ ETD, an email is sent to UMI when appropriate.

Conclusions: A new ETD-db 2.0 is designed and rewritten to improve the current ETD-db system in terms of reliability and security giving many benefits to all stakeholders (e.g., libraries, graduate schools, and contributors) and users (e.g., system administrators, managers, reviewers, catalogers, authors, etc). For our development process, a state of the art web development framework, Ruby on Rail, has been used to support requirements clarified by requirement analysis. Security issues have been improved by fine grained access control, increased audit logging, and maintenance eliminating inconsistencies between the file structure and database. In addition, more reliable content management has been accomplished by consistency between contents and their metadata, content integrity, and version control of each ETD. One of many future works is to make the new system more stable by means of repetitive tests, debugging and trouble shooting.

Enriching the VT ETD-db System with References - Sung Hee Park and Edward A. Fox (US)

Aims/Objectives: This project aims to enrich Virginia Tech’s ETD-db digital library system to handle references found in ETDs, typically in the final References section, but sometimes as footnotes or end of chapter references. One objective is to extend ETD-MS so that references can be included in the metadata. Another objective is to have automatic methods to extract these references from ETDs. A third objective is to manage the references inside ETD-db, providing browse, search, and presentation services.

Methods: We first extract the reference section (or other portions with references) from an ETD, store the references into the metadata database for ETDs, and show the reference information in the reference tab of the ETD “splash” page, pulling the reference information from the metadata database. Since reference sections can be located at each chapter, or as footnotes, as well as at the end of theses, new methods for intelligent and reliable reference extraction are being devised. These make use of machine learning, heuristics, knowledge bases, and text processing techniques.

Results: As a result of this project, an extended ETD-MS including reference information is proposed. Software and scripts for reference section extraction are under development. Metadata records with reference information included in the metadata will be generated, and represented according to the extended version of ETD-MS. Integrating all components, an ETD-db system with reference metadata information will be initially devised and tested. Those in the scholarly community who use ETDs will have an easier time accessing and giving credit to prior research publications.

Conclusions: A new reference tab is being added to the current ETD-db system on the ETD “splash” page, making use of the proposed ETD-MS extension to present bibliographical metadata for an ETD. A machine learning based algorithm supported by knowledge bases and text processing techniques can extract references, even from chapter references or footnotes. Such an ETD-db with reference metadata, can aid users to access reference information without directly opening a digital content file (often in the Portable Document Format, PDF). Then, through the digital library, content providers (i.e., student authors) will be able to provide extensive bibliographical information in a powerful way (as in COinS, Context Object in Span), supporting a crawler (e.g., Zotero, a Firefox plug in).

CARPET - a Directory of Generic Publishing Tools - Peter Schirmbacher (Germany)

The ongoing virtualization of media and work processes is changing scholarly and scientific communication. For many scientists and scholars, their computer has become the hub between their own (local) research and the national and global research context. Serious scholarly publications are processed to a large degree electronically, both in the preparatory stages of production and in use and distribution.
Electronic publishing has become omnipresent in today’s knowledge society and in particular in scientific and scholarly communication. Even where the communication is still largely determined by conditions derived from paper-based publication, information-processing systems are used in the production process. The particular challenge of electronic publishing is to transfer the various tasks, processes and supply lines of scientific and scholarly communication, which have been developed historically over long periods, to the full potential of digital production, supply, networking and distribution, in order to overcome the limitations of paper-based publishing.
A number of tools are used here, including word processing programs such as MS-Word and Open Office, publishing systems such as LaTeX and TUSTEP. Programs for literature management and graphics are also used, as well as software for raw data processing on a larger scale, and complex software systems to support communication and work organization, plus many more.
The German Research Foundation sponsored workshop “The Development of Generic Publishing Tools” on 23. November 2006 was a first attempt to look at the relevant developments in Germany and to bring teams of developers together. The workshop showed clearly that there is an urgent need to examine and assess the various approaches and to make them accessible to a broader public.
The CARPET project aims to support the efficient use of electronic tools and services for scientific and scholarly publishing. In view of international developments in this field, the following has been carried out initially in Germany:
• a survey of existing results has been presented in the form of a so-called Yellow Pages,
• a compass for analysis has been developed in order to determine a system and structure,
• a collaboration platform has been developed and made available and
• a virtual competence center has been established.
The aim of this presentation is to report in detail about CARPET and to encourage you to use it. From our point of view CARPET could be a very useful directory which gives you an overview and support for using of publishing tools.