Moving Electronic Theses from ETD-db to EPrints : The Best of Both Worlds: A Project Briefing Presented at the CNI Spring 2010 Membership Meeting, Baltimore, MD, April 12, 2010

Caltech Library Services' first digital archive came online in April 2001 using EPrints software from the University of Southampton. We began collecting electronic theses early as well: voluntary deposit of Ph.D. theses began in 2001, and became mandatory in July 2002. The thesis collection was hosted on the ETD-db software platform developed at Virginia Tech. By 2008 it became clear that we needed to consolidate our repository platforms. We decided to move our electronic theses to EPrints Version 3, the platform in use for our institutional repository. We did not, however, want to lose the many unique features of the Virginia Tech ETD-db software, such as thesis-specific workflow, the ability for staff to communicate with thesis authors via email from within the ETD-db interface, and fine-grained, thesis-specific access controls. We also wanted to add new features that were not available in either platform, such as tracking the progress of a thesis through the complex local approval and release process, and the ability to store related documents, such as signed thesis forms and permissions letters, with the thesis but in a "dark" area of the record visible only to repository administrators. This briefing explains what was involved in the transition from ETD-db to EPrints for our thesis collection and how the Caltech Library took advantage of the flexibility of the EPrints platform to meet our requirements. It also suggests ways that other institutions may be able to adopt and build on what we've done, and why EPrints 3 may be a good electronic thesis repository solution for other institutions

Smoothing the Transition to Mandatory Electronic Theses

After a year of voluntary submissions, Caltech is requiring electronic thesis submission for all graduate students effective July 1, 2002. Website development, user education, collaboration between library and campus computing staff, and with faculty and the dean's office are all integral to the transition

Scholars Forum: A New Model For Scholarly Communication

Scholarly journals have flourished for over 300 years because they successfully address a broad range of authors' needs: to communicate findings to colleagues, to establish precedence of their work, to gain validation through peer review, to establish their reputation, to know the final version of their work is secure, and to know their work will be accessible by future scholars. Eventually, the development of comprehensive paper and then electronic indexes allowed past work to be readily identified and cited. Just as postal service made it possible to share scholarly work regularly and among a broad readership, the Internet now provides a distribution channel with the power to reduce publication time and to expand traditional print formats by supporting multi-media options and threaded discourse. Despite widespread acceptance of the web by the academic and research community, the incorporation of advanced network technology into a new paradigm for scholarly communication by the publishers of print journals has not materialized. Nor have journal publishers used the lower cost of distribution on the web to make online versions of journals available at lower prices than print versions. It is becoming increasingly clear to the scholarly community that we must envision and develop for ourselves a new, affordable model for disseminating and preserving results, that synthesizes digital technology and the ongoing needs of scholars. In March 1997, with support from the Engineering Information Foundation, Caltech sponsored a Conference on Scholarly Communication to open a dialogue around key issues and to consider the feasibility of alternative undertakings. A general consensus emerged recognizing that the certification of scholarly articles through peer review could be "decoupled" from the rest of the publishing process, and that the peer review process is already supported by the universities whose faculty serve as editors, members of editorial boards, and referees. In the meantime, pressure to enact regressive copyright legislation has added another important element. The ease with which electronic files may be copied and forwarded has encouraged publishers and other owners of copyrighted material to seek means for denying access to anything they own in digital form to all but active subscribers or licensees. Furthermore, should publishers retain the only version of a publication in a digital form, there is a significant risk that this material may eventually be lost through culling little-used or unprofitable back-files, through not investing in conversion expense as technology evolves, through changes in ownership, or through catastrophic physical events. Such a scenario presents an intolerable threat to the future of scholarship

Taking the Plunge: Requiring the ETD

It made sense for Caltech, the California Institute of Technology (a private, technically focused, U.S. university, http://www.caltech.edu), to go electronic when it comes to theses. It took, however, more than three years: From March 1999 when Prof. Ed Fox of the Virginia Technical University spoke at Caltech to July 2002 when ETDs became required for all PhD candidates. How was it done and what are the lessons learned

Traditional Processing Meets Islandora

The Caltech Archives have been digitizing the papers of Paul B. MacCready, a major figure in aeronautical engineering in the second half of the 20th century. His papers include notebooks, diaries, correspondence, drawings, photographs, and audiovisual material. Islandora was chosen as the platform for access and preservation. The collection had previously been processed and a finding aid had been created. We present three innovations that have contributed to efficient digitization and ingest into Islandora, and to optimal user experience. We created a naming scheme for digitized files based on the series, box, and folder numbering of the collection. This allowed us to automatically match files with descriptive metadata and to create local identifier links as part of the ingested metadata in Islandora. We built on UCLA’s prior work to allow navigation of the collection by means of the finding aid, which is displayed in Islandora and contains links to folders. This gives intellectual context to searches. Finally, we have been working to incorporate the IIIF-compliant Universal Viewer as an additional viewer available for multipage objects

OpenURL-Aware ETDs

Chapter on "OpenURL-Aware ETDs" from the book "Electronic Theses and Dissertations: a Sourcebook for Educators, Students, and Librarians," edited by Edward A. Fox, Shahrooz Feizabadi, Joseph M. Moxley, Christian R. Weisser. New York: Marcel Dekker, Inc., c2004

Building an open platform across diverse content and technologies

Repository management and publication systems are adopted or evolve within specific academic and research environments to meet short term goals and manage content in the longer term. At Caltech this evolution has resulted in purpose-specific repositories including: Islandora and ArchivesSpace for archival objects and metadata; EPrints for theses, published articles, unpublished papers, and books; and Invenio for research data. This diversity requires a variety of skills to manage, generates unacceptable levels of technical debt, and hampers the ability of our end users to access our resources easily. Additionally none of these systems individually supports open aggregation of content for both derivative and new research purposes. This presentation will discuss a variety of evolutionary strategies to move our repository ecosystem to one that (1) exposes our diverse data in consistent ways that promote dynamic use and reuse; (2) supports a full range of services, from public access to digital preservation; and (3) minimizes technical diversity as much as possible, in order to promote sustainability and efficiency. Our objective is to reposition our current set of independent repositories as a single, dynamic node on the web, capable of providing users with an integrated view of diverse content in an open environment