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Rhodes university the ses and dissertations

Rhodes university the ses and dissertations some publishers over the

Abstract

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is really a collaborative effort of universities all over the world to advertise creating, archiving, disbursing and being able to access Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Since its beginning in 1996, on the hundred universities have became a member of the initiative, underscoring the significance institutions put on training their graduates within the emerging types of digital publishing and knowledge access. The outreach and training mission of NDLTD is definitely an ongoing project so in the following paragraphs we set of the present status of membership and support activities. Reserach has centered on developing a union database which will provide a way to search and retrieve ETDs in the combined collections of NDLTD member institutions. The Virtua system produced by VTLS assists because the heart of the union database. To be able to bridge the space between your existing distributed institutional archives along with a unified assortment of ETDs, we’ve created a metadata standard especially suitable for ETDs – your particulars are often utilized by partner sites to export their freely-available metadata while using Metadata Harvesting Protocol from the Open Archives Initiative. We link name authority information in to the metadata records to aid unique identification of authors yet others connected using the works. Additional research efforts include advanced search mechanisms, semantic interoperability, the development and design of multi- and mix-lingual search systems, and software modules that support the introduction of greater-level services to assist researchers in seeking relevant ETDs.

Introduction

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD, see world wide web.ndltd.org ) has emerged because of the efforts of a large number of students, faculty, and staff at countless universities all over the world, along with the aid of your customers at lots of companies, government departments, along with other organizations.

Rhodes university the ses and dissertations the current

This federation has multiple objectives, including:

  • to enhance graduate education by permitting students to create electronic documents, use digital libraries, and understand issues in publishing
  • to improve the supply of student research for scholars and also to preserve it digitally
  • to reduce the price of submitting and handling theses and dissertations
  • to empower students to share a more potent message by using multimedia and hypermedia technologies
  • to empower universities to unlock their information sources and
  • to succeed digital library technology.

Work toward individuals objectives has began since November 1987, the date from the first meeting dedicated to exploring how advanced electronic publishing technologies could be relevant to the preparation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Early attempts are summarized in 2 D-Lib articles in 1996 and 1997 [Fox et al, 1996 Fox et al. 1997 ]. Another article summarizes the very first tries to support, through federated search, accessibility collection (see also world wide web.theses.org ) of ETDs that’s emerging in distributed fashion [Powell Fox, 1998 ].

NDLTD activities are coordinated by an worldwide steering committee that fits each fall and spring.

Rhodes university the ses and dissertations particular chapters or multimedia

Its people include individuals who lead the varied regional and national efforts that promote efforts regarding ETDs. Committees assist with proper planning, standards (see world wide web.ndltd.org/standards ), training, and conferences. A large amount of effort by steering committee people went into fund-raising, to ensure that single and categories of institutions could implement ETD initiatives. There has been national projects in the united states [Kipp, et al. 1999 ], Nigeria, Germany, Australia, along with other countries. Supporting searching continues to be funded by NSF (in projects IIS-9986089 [Fox, 2000 ], IIS-0086227 [Fox, et al. 2000 ], IIS-0080748 [Fox, et al. 2001 ]), in addition to DFG (in Germany) and CONACyT (in Mexico).

In the grass roots level, one type of support for NDLTD emerged from efforts at Virginia Tech, that has developed training materials and workflow store which have been adapted by diverse groups. A number of other projects and programs thinking about ETDs have come to light all over the world, some individually, but each one is thanks for visiting collaborate with the growing federation that’s NDLTD. This will be significant since open discussing of the way helps others understand how to address problems in addition to ongoing alterations in technology. Already there has been four worldwide symposia on ETDs, with roughly 200 attendees at each one of the latter. The following two is going to be held May 30 – June 1, 2002 at Brigham Youthful College in Provo, Utah, and late spring, 2003, in Berlin. The NDLTD steering committee has its own spring conferences with the ETD conferences.

These efforts must have a powerful positive impact on expanding awareness at universities around the world. An important agent promoting learning within this arena may be the UNESCO Worldwide Guide in order to obtain ETDs (see etdguide.org/ ). To be sold late in 2001 in many different languages, this book / site will help students, faculty, and managers take part in NDLTD. This will extend the considerable progress already made, out of the box discussed within the next section.

NDLTD Progress

NDLTD has experienced constant progress since its formation. We’ve registered development in all major facets, including membership (by having an growing worldwide participation), collection size, access, multimedia use, and worldwide availability.

Table 1 shows NDLTD membership by August 2001. In under 2 . 5 years, NDLTD has greater than bending the amount of registered people (from 59 people in May 1999). You will find presently 120 people 52 U.S. universities, 52 non-U.S. universities, and 16 institutions, regional centers and organizations (for example UNESCO). These various partners represent 23 countries: Australia, South america, Canada, China, Colombia, Germany, A holiday in greece, Hong Kong, India, Italia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norwegian, Russia, Singapore, Nigeria, Columbia, The country, Sudan, Norway, Taiwan, the united states, and also the Uk. These figures also highlight the development of worldwide curiosity about NDLTD as worldwide participation increased from under 1 / 3 in 1998 to 1 / 2 of the entire membership in 2001. Also, by early 2002, a minimum of 11 from the registered NDLTD people may have began requiring mandatory submission of electronic theses and dissertations. (Within the table below, individuals are marked by having an asterisk.)

USA Universities (524)

Table 5. Multimedia use within VT-ETD collection

When it comes to , a substantial concern is whether or not to permit the electronic document to become viewed worldwide, on campus only, or by no means. The mixed situation, that is a unique capacity of electronic documents, takes place when some portions (e.g. particular chapters or multimedia files) have restricted access while some tend to be more broadly available. Nearly all Virginia Tech students allow their documents to become viewable worldwide (see Figure 1) – however, many initially not grant worldwide access to be able to safeguard their publication legal rights. To deal with this problem, you will find ongoing discussions with publishers to assist them to comprehend the goals and advantages of NDLTD [NDLTD, 1999 ]. We’re very happy to see a general change in attitude by a few publishers during the period of the work. The American Chemical Society created a policy better to NDLTD because of extended discussions and also the American Physics Society continues to be receptive to issues in regards to the Open Archives Initiative and NDLTD.

Figure 1. Student and committee option for ETD availability from Virginia Tech
(2668 ETDs by This summer 17, 2000).

Standards Activity

To be able to support most of the current and future research and repair-related activities, work has started to define standards that will more consistent exchange of knowledge within an interoperable atmosphere. One of the primary of those projects is ETDMS – the Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Metadata Standard – along with a related task for name authority control.

ETDMS was created with the NDLTD, and it has been refined during the period of the this past year. The first goal ended up being to create a single standard XML DTD for encoding the entire text of the ETD. Amongst other things, an ETD encoded in XML could include wealthy metadata about the writer and work that may be easily extracted to be used in union databases and so on. During initial discussions it grew to become obvious the methods utilized by different institutions to organize and cope with theses and dissertations will make it basically impossible to agree on one DTD for encoding the entire text of the ETD. Many institutions were reluctant or unprepared to make use of XML to encode ETDs whatsoever.

Thus, rather of the XML DTD for encoding the entire text of the ETD, ETDMS become an adaptable group of guidelines for encoding and discussing very fundamental metadata regarding ETDs among institutions. Separate work continues in parallel on the suite of DTDs, building on the common framework, for full ETDs.

ETDMS is dependant on the Dublin Core Element Set [DCMI, 1999 ], but includes yet another element specific to metadata regarding theses and dissertations. Despite its name, ETDMS is made to cope with metadata connected with paper and electronic theses and dissertations. It’s also made to handle metadata in lots of languages, including metadata regarding just one work that’s been recorded in numerous languages. The ETDMS standard [Atkins, et al. 2001 ] provides detailed guidelines on mapping details about an ETD to metadata elements.

ETDMS already is supported being an output format for that Open Archives interface towards the Virginia Tech ETD collection. ETDMS is going to be recognized being an input format for that union catalog presently being developed along with VTLS [VTLS, 2001 ]. NDLTD strongly encourages utilization of ETDMS.

Each mention of the a person or institution within an ETDMS field should have a string representing the specific individual or institution because it seems within the work. Additionally, these references may also have a URI that suggests an authoritative record for your individual or institution. Connecting authority control with NDLTD appears particularly appropriate since universities know a good deal about individuals with whom they award levels and also, since a thesis or dissertation frequently may be the first significant publication of the student.

The NDLTD: Authority Linking Proposal [Youthful, 2001 ] identifies several goals for any Linked Authority File (LAF) system to aid this requirement:

  • LAF records ought to be freely produced and shared among participants. While a main authority database is definitely an option, the LAF design expects the database to become given to share cost. Individual participants or groups will be able to host a duplicate from the LAF database and share changes they create to local copies of LAF records along with other hosts while using Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol [Lagoze and Van de Sompel, 2001 ]. The mechanism to keep records synchronized is described within the proposal.
  • The URIs ought to be significant and helpful to anybody outdoors NDLTDs domain. An advantage of utilizing the OAI protocol is the fact that individual LAF records is going to be accessible with an OAI GetRecord request (discussed within the second thing about this article).
  • The URIs ought to be persistent and current. This raises numerous challenges, for example duplicate resolution. By utilizing PURLs [OCLC, 2001 ] in ETDMS records, the actual OAI GetRecord URLs could be rearranged without having affected the ETDMS records that depend in it.
  • The model ought to be scalable and relevant beyond NDLTD. The LAF model is built to work entirely with open standards and open-source software.

The LAF design has other advantages over alternatives like the Library of Congress Name Authority Database [Library of Congress, 2001 ]. Only the amount of participation among decentralized participants limits the policy from the collection. Since the records derive from XML, the information of LAF records is often as broad or narrow when needed. Finally, since they’re distributed while using OAI protocol, multiple metadata formats could be supported.

Way forward for NDLTD

The data presented illustrate the production and archiving of electronic theses and dissertations is quickly becoming an recognized area of the normal operation of universities within the new electronic age. NDLTD is devoted to supporting this trend with tools, standards, and services that empower individual institutions to setup and keep their very own collections of ETDs. Simultaneously NDLTD promotes using these ETDs through institutional websites in addition to portal-type websites that aggregate the person sites and make seamless views from the NDLTD collection.

Ongoing research and repair-provision projects are addressing the issues of methods to merge together the presently distributed and somewhat isolated collections located each and every member institution. The 2nd thing about this article discusses a few of these projects at length, including growth and development of the Union Catalog Portal according to VTLSs Virtua system and also the numerous research efforts investigating how you can have better services to researchers with specific information-seeking needs and behaviors.

References

Atkins, Anthony, Edward A. Fox, Robert France and Hussein Suleman (editors). 2001. ETD-ms: an Interoperability Metadata Standard for Electronic Theses and Dissertations — version 1.00. Offered by world wide web.ndltd.org/standards/metadata/ETD-ms-v1.00.html .

DCMI. 1999. Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description. Offered by world wide web.dublincore.org/documents/dces/ .

Fox, Edward A. 2000. Core Research for that Networked College Digital Library (NUDL), NSF IIS-9986089 (SGER), 5/15/2000 – 3/1/2002. Project director, E. Fox.

Fox, Edward A. John L. Eaton, Gail McMillan, Neill A. Kipp, Laura Weiss, Emilio Arce, and Scott Guyer. 1996. National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: A Scalable and Sustainable Method of Unlock College Sources, D-Lib Magazine. September 1996. Offered at world wide web.dlib.org/dlib/september96/theses/09fox.html .

Fox, Edward A. John DeVane, John L. Eaton, Neill A. Kipp, Paul Mather, Tim McGonigle, Gail McMillan, and William Schweiker. 1997. Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations: An Worldwide Effort Unlocking College Sources, D-Lib Magazine. September 1997. Offered at world wide web.dlib.org/dlib/september97/theses/09fox.html .

Fox, Edward A. Royca Zia, and Eberhard Hilf. 2000. Open Archives: Distributed services for physicists and graduated pupils (OAD), NSF IIS-0086227, 9/1/2000-8/31/2003. Project director, E. Fox (w. Royce Zia, Physics, VT, and E. Hilf, U. Oldenburg, PI on matching German DFG project).

Fox, Edward A. J. Alfredo Sánchez, and David Garza-Salazar. 2001. High End Interoperable Digital Libraries on view Archives Initiative, NSF IIS-0080748, 3/1/2001-2/28/2003. Project director, E. Fox (with co-PIs J.Alfredo Snchez, Universidad de las Américas-Puebla — UDLA, and David Garza-Salazar, Monterrey Technology Institute — ITESM, both funded by CONACyT in Mexico).

Kipp, Neill, Edward A. Fox, Gail McMillan, and John L. Eaton. 1999. FIPSE Final Report. 11/30/99. Offered by world wide web.ndltd.org/pubs/FIPSEfr.pdf (PDF version) and world wide web.ndltd.org/pubs/FIPSEfr.doc (MS-Word version).

Lagoze, Carl and Herbert Van de Sompel. 2001. Outdoors Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. Open Archives Initiative. The month of january 2001. Offered by world wide web.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html .

Library of Congress. 2001. Program for Cooperative Cataloguing Name Authority Component Webpage. Offered by world wide web.loc.gov/catdir/pcc/naco.html .

NDLTD. 1999. Publishers and also the NDLTD. NDLTD, This summer 1999. Offered by world wide web.ndltd.org/publshrs/ .

OCLC. 2001. Persistent URL Webpage. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center. Offered by purl.oclc.org/ .

Powell, James and Edward A. Fox. 1998. Multilingual Federated Searching Across Heterogeneous Collections. D-Lib Magazine. September 1998. Offered at world wide web.dlib.org/dlib/september98/powell/09powell.html .

Youthful, Jeffrey A. 2001. NDLTD: Authority Linking Proposal. Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center. Offered by alcme.oclc.org/ndltd/AuthLink.html .

2001 Hussein Suleman, Anthony Atkins, Marcos A. Gonçalves, Robert K. France, Edward A. Fox, Vinod Chachra, Murray Crowder, and Shaun Youthful


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