Moyle, M.

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UCL Discovery

DART-Europe: pan-European networking and servicesMartin MoyleDigital Curation ManagerUCL Library ServicesUCL (University College London)http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Libraryhttp://www.dart-europe.euIntroductionDART-Europe (Digital Access to Research Theses – Europe) is a partnershipof European research organisations with a shared interest in the collection,management and dissemination of open access electronic research theses.The partnership was founded in 2005, with the over-arching purpose ofsupporting the management, discoverability, re-usability and preservation ofEurope’s electronic research theses.DART-Europe’s membership primarily consists of consortia and nationallibraries, although individual Universities are increasingly becoming involved.DART-Europe is both a networking organisation and a service provider: in thelatter regard, the partnership maintains the DART-Europe E-theses Portal,which is a discovery and access service for Open Access theses which havebeen approved for higher degrees in European Universities. The DARTpartnership has no external funders, and any work carried out in the name ofthe consortium rests entirely on the willingness of its members to contributetime and other resources: the Portal, for instance, is managed by UCL(University College London) on behalf of the partners. DART-Europe worksvery closely with LIBER (Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes deRecherche)1, and the Portal carries LIBER’s official endorsement. DART-Europe is also the European Working Group of the NDLTD (Networked DigitalLibrary of Dissertations)2.Managing European collaborationAt the time of writing, DART-Europe has participants in 15 European countries.The cohesion of the DART-Europe consortium is achieved through theprinciple of partnership. In support of this, a Partnership Agreement3 hasbeen devised. The Agreement, which every partner is asked to sign, isdesigned to be ‘light-touch’. Signatories agree to support 7 general principlesand to help to achieve the aims of DART-Europe: in summary, they are invitedto contribute metadata to the DART-Europe Portal, they are invited tocontribute resources to support DART-Europe’s work, they agree to helpDART-Europe to be an effective network for e-thesis information, expertiseand resources, and they agree to nominate a representative to serve on theDART-Europe Board. Partnership costs nothing. The intentions behind thePartnership Agreement are to define a shared vision, and to help to create asense of community, rather than to place any significant resourcecommitments on the partners.Every partner is represented on the DART-Europe Board4, which governs thework of the consortium, and which meets once or twice a year. The Board isaugmented by invited members (representing, for instance, LIBER).Between meetings, an Executive Group comprising the Board’s Co-chairs andthe Portal service manager meet more frequently to expedite actions agreedby the Board, to discuss progress, to review new collaboration opportunities,and generally to ensure that the strategic questions which are put before theBoard at its meetings are the right ones.In addition to its partners, DART-Europe has another category of member:contributors. Contributors are organisations which supply metadata to theDART-Europe Portal, but which do not sign the Partnership Agreement.Although not full, decision-making partners, DART-Europe’s contributorsobviously have a very important role to play in the development of theconsortium and its services.For an unfunded organisation such as DART-Europe, this inclusive structureis a neatly pragmatic solution to the challenges of international cohesion andgovernance.Open Access electronic thesesBefore looking at DART-Europe’s E-theses Portal in more detail, it is probablyworth touching quickly on the subject of Open Access e-theses in general.There are several good reasons why authors should be encouraged to maketheir theses available on an Open Access basis. Theses can contain cutting-edge research, and yet in the print world they are often partially-hidden anddifficult to access. OA theses make new research available to researchers ina timely way. Moreover, they help to highlight the work of early-careerresearchers, as well as acting as a showcase for the quality and currency ofthe research activities of research groups and universities. In this way theycan help to raise the impact of academic institutions, and to stimulate newresearch income from academic and industrial collaborations. Meanwhile,public visibility helps with the detection of plagiarism, and of course that easeof detection also acts as a deterrent. The electronic model also facilitates theopen dissemination of supplementary data, animations, 3D-models and othermultimedia to support and enrich the core thesis.Many examples from UCL's institutional repository help to support theargument that open access theses can raise research impact. Two arementioned here. The first example, Thomson, Catherine Claire (2003)Danmarkshistorier: National imagination and novel in late twentieth-centuryDenmark5 has been in the UCL repository for some three years. Since thecollection of download statistics began in January 2008, it has beendownloaded over 1400 times. A second example is a recent thesis: Wang, H.(2009) New strategies for low noise, agile PLL frequency synthesis6. It wasdeposited in June 2009, and has already received over 300 downloads. It isclearly not the case that every repository download translates into a citation inthe research literature. However, how many times is the average thesisconsulted in hard copy at the University library over a lifetime? Open accesse-theses are much more visible and more frequently accessed than printtheses. They can help to showcase the work of researchers and theirinstitutions. Including details of such theses in the DART-Europe Portal helpsto increase this exposure.The DART-Europe E-theses Portal7The DART Portal provides discovery services for open access research e-theses. The Portal collects data from repositories from all over Europe. Thecontent changes daily, but currently stands at over 120,000 theses approvedby some 200 different Universities, sourced from repositories in 15 Europeancountries. New records are added daily. The Portal holds metadata abouttheses, but the full text is always served to the researcher from the originatingrepository: the Portal's role is to enhance the discoverability of those full texts.Metadata is collected using OAI-PMH, and various standardisation andindexing routines are applied to support services. Simple Dublin Core is usedas the data collection format, in order to make participation in the Portal aseasy as possible for content-holding Universities and consortia.The Portal has a simple interface with a single search box. A more advanced,form-filling search is also available. Boolean searching is supported. Resultslists present brief details about each thesis - title, author and date of award –and also credit both the University that awarded the thesis, and thecontributing organisation. This helps consortial contributors to keep their ownidentity in the Portal alongside those of their members. Browsing is alsooffered, by author, awarding University, contributor, country and year of award.Clicking any title will bring up full details of a thesis. The full records aredisplayed exactly as they are received by the DART-Europe harvester.Abstracts, keywords and other information are often included; each recordalways includes at least one http identifier, which provides access to the fulltext at the source repository.The Portal has 'marked list' and search history facilities. New records aredisplayed on the home page in daily and weekly lists, and are available as aRSS feed. The home page has a feedback form, which is surprisingly wellused. The content of the Portal is also crawled and indexed by searchengines. This adds yet another level of discoverability to the theses whosedetails are held in the Portal.It would be difficult to achieve richer services than those which are already inplace without either imposing a DART-specific metadata standard oncontributors, with which many would not have the time, resources or technicalexpertise to comply, or greatly escalating the levels of post-aggregationintervention, which the consortium is not in a position to resource. The DARTPortal is currently designed to strike a balance between ease of contribution,complexity of maintenance, and helpfulness to users. The aim might becharacterised as to do the simple things well.Usage reports attached to the Portal appear to show healthy patterns of use.It is pleasing to see that usage is steadily increasing, particularly as DART-Europe does not have a dedicated marketing budget. Many of the users arebased in Europe, but the 'top ten countries' for recent months shows a mixtureof European and non-European countries (including the US, Mexico andBrazil). A sample of recent feedback shows comments – complimentary! –originating in Thailand, France, Brazil, Germany and Slovakia. Usage andfeedback data tend to confirm that the European research covered by thePortal is of worldwide interest, and that DART-Europe’s role in disseminatingthis research is an effective one.The DART-Europe E-theses Portal benefits the entire research community ina number of ways. It helps to raise the visibility of participating consortia andUniversities, and because it is designed with simplicity in mind, it does so at alow cost to those participants. It helps to expose the work of early-careerresearchers, and to introduce them at the beginning of their academic lives toimportant issues of open access and copyright. It also helps researchers ingeneral: by aggregating content, DART-Europe provides a single entry pointto a large quantity of consistently high-level research in an orderly and easily-searchable format and, because of open access, that research is immediatelyavailable in full anywhere in the world.ConclusionThe DART-Europe E-theses Portal is a simple discovery tool, but a useful one.It holds a growing body of content, and is becoming increasingly well-used.The Portal is good for researchers and good for research. However, there ismore to DART-Europe than the Portal service. The consortium has anexpanding partnership which includes representatives of a growing number ofEuropean countries, and it has strong links with LIBER and the NDLTD.DART-Europe is becoming an effective e-theses networking organisation: forinstance, the partners will be holding an e-theses Master Class as part of the2010 LIBER Annual General Conference8. Within the consortium there is awealth of experience and expertise in the field of electronic theses and DART-Europe, supported by a practical and inclusive organisational structure, is wellplaced to harness some of these interests for the benefit of all EuropeanUniversities.References1 LIBER: http://www.libereurope.eu/2 NDLTD: http://www.ndltd.org/3 DART-Europe Partnership Agreement:http://www.dart-europe.eu/About/documents/docs.php4 DART-Europe Board: http://www.dart-europe.eu/About/contacts/board.php5 http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/19406 http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/158307 DART-Europe E-theses Portal: http://www.dart-europe.eu8 LIBER 2010 Annual General Conference: http://www.libereurope.eu/node/434

DART-Europe: pan-European networking and services

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