ETD Management in the Texas Digital Library: lessons Learned from a Demonstrator

As a consortium of libraries from public and private institutions across the state of Texas, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) exists to promote the scholarly activities of its members. One of its earliest initiatives was a federated collection of ETDs from across the state. There are currently 16 participating schools in TDL, four of which are contributing over 4000 ETDs per year, and membership and contributions are growing. A diverse set of content contributors introduces the problems of inconsistent metadata and incompatible storage and access methods, making it difficult to offer effective tools and services. This influenced the decision to create a state-wide system for managing the entire life-cycle of ETDs, from the point of ingestion to final publication; pooling resources to address this common problem was appealing for both technical and economic reasons. In 2007, we reported on the status of the functional system prototype. This paper reports on the results of the demonstrator event that is taking place in spring 2008 at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas, and discusses the requirements for moving to a production environment. These include testing and scaling the system to handle the large numbers of users dispersed over a significant geographic area (Texas is the third-largest producer of PhDs in the US). Our intention is to embrace international standards for ETD metadata and policies as they continue to evolve through community efforts, such as the NDLTD union catalog of ETDs. Finally, we will examine the status of the project’s release as an add-on component to a DSpace repository through the Manakin interface framework under an open source license. A primary design goal of this project is to create a product that satisfies TDL’s requirements and provides a turnkey implementation for ETD management and publication that can be scaled for the broader academic community

ETD Management in the Texas Digital Library: lessons Learned from a Demonstrator

As a consortium of libraries from public and private institutions across the state of Texas, the Texas Digital Library (TDL) exists to promote the scholarly activities of its members. One of its earliest initiatives was a federated collection of ETDs from across the state. There are currently 16 participating schools in TDL, four of which are contributing over 4000 ETDs per year, and membership and contributions are growing. A diverse set of content contributors introduces the problems of inconsistent metadata and incompatible storage and access methods, making it difficult to offer effective tools and services. This influenced the decision to create a state-wide system for managing the entire life-cycle of ETDs, from the point of ingestion to final publication; pooling resources to address this common problem was appealing for both technical and economic reasons. In 2007, we reported on the status of the functional system prototype. This paper reports on the results of the demonstrator event that is taking place in spring 2008 at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas, and discusses the requirements for moving to a production environment. These include testing and scaling the system to handle the large numbers of users dispersed over a significant geographic area (Texas is the third-largest producer of PhDs in the US). Our intention is to embrace international standards for ETD metadata and policies as they continue to evolve through community efforts, such as the NDLTD union catalog of ETDs. Finally, we will examine the status of the project’s release as an add-on component to a DSpace repository through the Manakin interface framework under an open source license. A primary design goal of this project is to create a product that satisfies TDL’s requirements and provides a turnkey implementation for ETD management and publication that can be scaled for the broader academic community

Introducing Vireo: an ETD Submittal and Management System for DSpace

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : DSpace User Group PresentationsDate: 2009-05-20 03:30 PM – 05:00 PMThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a consortium of public and private institutions from across the state of Texas; a major project in TDL is the development of a state-wide repository for managing the entire life-cycle of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). The Texas ETD Repository is a large effort that span multiple independent initiatives, all of which interact to support the overall task of managing ETDs in Texas. This presentation will describe Vireo, the customized submission and workflow management application that TDL developed for DSpace, and it's role within the Texas ETD Repository. We will describe its current implementation as a Manakin aspect and theme, and discuss the future plans for the application, including its release to the repository community under an open source license.Institute for Museum and Library Sciences; Texas Digital Librar

DSpace XML UI Project Technical Overview

This paper describes the modifications to DSpace by Texas A&M Libraries to support an XML-based user interface. DSpace supports digital repositories composed of communities and collections. Each community within DSpace typically represents an organizational unit within an institution. To increase the appeal of DSpace as a digital repository to these communities, this project enables the establishment of a unique look and feel that might extend outside of DSpace into an existing web presence. We believe this may increase the adoption of DSpace by these communities.Digital Initiatives Research and Technology, Texas A&M Librarie

Developing a Common Submission System for ETDs in the Texas Digital Library

The Texas Digital Library is a consortium of universities organized to provide a single digital infrastructure for the scholarly activities of Texas universities. The four current Association of Research Libraries (ARL) universities and their systems comprise more than 40 campuses, 375,000 students, 30,000 faculty, and 100,000 staff; while non-ARL institutions represent another sizable addition in both students and faculty1. TDL’s principal collection is currently its federated collection of ETDs from three of the major institutions; The University of Texas, Texas A&M University, and Texas Tech University. Since the ARL institutions in Texas alone produce over 4,000 ETDs per year, the growth potential for a single state-wide repository is significant. To facilitate the creation of this federated collection, the schools agreed upon a common metadata standard represented by a MODS XML schema2. Although this creates a baseline for metadata consistency, there exists ambiguity within the interpretation of the schema that creates usability and interoperability challenges. Name resolution issues are not addressed by the schema, and certain descriptive metadata elements need consistency in format and level of significance so that common repository functionality will operate intuitively across the collection. It was determined that a common ingestion point for ETDs was needed to collect metadata in a consistent, authoritative manner. A working group was formed that consisted of representatives from five universities, and a state-wide survey of the state of ETDs was conducted, with varied levels of engagement with ETDs reported. Many issues were identified, including policy questions such as open access publishing, copyright considerations and the collection of release authorizations, the role of infrastructure development such as a Shibboleth federation for authentication, and interoperability with third-party publishers such as UMI. ETD workflows at six schools were analyzed, and a meta-workflow was identified with three stages: ingest, verification, and publication. It was decided that Shibboleth would be used for authentication and identity management within the application. This paper reports on the results of the survey, and describes the system and submission workflow that was developed as a consequence. A functional prototype of the ingest stage has been built, and a full prototype with Shibboleth integration is slated for completion in May of 2007. Demonstrators of the application are expected to be deployed in fall of 2007 at three schools.Texas A&M University Libraries, The University of Texas Librarie

Preserving the Scholarly Side of the Web

This paper presents results of a case study that addresses many issues surrounding the difficult task of preservation in a digital library. We focus on a subset of these issues as they apply to the preservation of scholarly articles encoded in current web standards. We also describe the two common preservation mechanisms, emulation and migration, as well as our selection of the latter for our particular case. Finally, we compare two approaches to migration, automatic and manual, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses in our context. We show that consistent use of open standards leads to more efficient migration processes and issue a “call to arms” to the digital preservation community to ensure that scholarly material currently on the web can be preserved for future generations.Digital Initiatives Research, Texas A&M Librarie

Adding OAI-ORE Support to Repository Platforms

The Texas Digital Library is a cooperative initiative of Texas universities. One of TDL’s core services is a federated collection of ETDs from its member schools. As this collection grew, the need for tools to manage the content exchange from the local to the federated repository became evident. This paper presents our experiences adding harvesting support to the DSpace repository platform using the ORE and PMH protocols from the Open Archives Initiative. We describe our use case for a statewide ETD repository and the mapping of the OAI-ORE data model to the DSpace architecture. We discuss our implementation that adds both dissemination and harvesting functionality to the repository. We conclude by discussing the architectural flexibility added to the TDL repository through this project.Texas Digital Library, Texas A&M University Libraries, Institute of Museum and Library Service