Posters
Title: ETDs in Developing and Transition Countries: Results of eIFL.net Activities
Author:
Iryna Kuchma, eIFL.net
In 2007 eIFL.net launched a federated repository for developing and transition countries, with the objective of providing: an infrastructure for countries; increased visibility of scholarly publications in the developing world; international co-operation and community building; a raised awareness of the importance of standards, the addition of full text within repositories; training and motivation to countries to set up repositories (encouraging competition). eIFL requested assistance from the SURF Foundation DARE project to harvest the metadata of existing institutional repositories in the members countries, and contracted the Dutch company CQ2 (used by SURF DARE and later by DRIVER) to examine the quality and quantity of existing institutional repositories. In 2007 an eIFL federated repository and a demonstrator with harvesting and statistical reports was created (http://eifl.cq2.org).
eIFL.net has launched a portal for 97 institutional repositories from 17 developing and transition countries (Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Estonia, Kyrgyzstan, Lithuania, Mongolia, Namibia, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Uganda, Ukraine and Zimbabwe) and this number is growing. It now gives every visitor free access to 141,841 full-text research findings in a consistent and harmonised way and among them there are 48,211 ETDs. With the creation of the eIFL federated repository a number of challenges showed up (like the lack of standards for proper harvesting and a lack of compliancy). eIFL also responded to requests by individual countries for conducting practical workshops on setting up Open Access institutional repositories and populating them with ETDs.
Launching the federated repository helped not only to build a virtual network of institutional repositories from eIFL countries (highlighting ETDs as an important University intellectual product); it also created national and international layers of repository representation and stimulated more developments. eIFL is now moving towards linking up with the EU-funded DRIVER project. The poster highlights the development of ETDs in developing and transition countries, presents country case studies (China, Estonia, Lithuania, Russia and South Africa) and provides recommendations for future action.
Title: The Lithuanian ETD Repository and its Regulations, Rules and Documents
Authors:
Antanas Štreimikis, Kaunas University of Technology
Vilius Kučiukas, Kaunas University of Technology
Aleksandras Targamadzė, Kaunas University of Technology
Linas Stabingis, Lithuanian University of Agriculture
Stanislovas Žurauskas, Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Lithuania
The Lithuanian ETD collection was created at the end of 2003 with financial support from UNESCO and using UNESCO recommendations widely applied all over the world. Since 2006 the Lithuanian ETD collection, which contains more than 6100 ETDs, has operated as one of five e-document collections in the Lithuanian Academic E-library (eLABa). eLABa is legalized as an open access based national repository. It is owned by the Ministry of Education and Science of Lithuanian Republic, and managed by Kaunas University of Technology. All Lithuanian science and study institutions are encouraged to store the documents of their students in the eLABa ETD collection. After signing appropriate contracts, almost all science and study institutions in Lithuania supply data. That is why all documents legalizing the national repository eLABa cover the Lithuanian ETD collection. The poster describes the eLABa ETD collection, its regulations, rules, documents and application software together with recommendations for future activities.
Title: Access to PDF Dissertations on DVD in Asia: lessons for library consortia worldwide
Author:
Jacqui Gilchrist, ProQuest
Numerous library consortia groups throughout Asia, as well as some European countries, take delivery of PDF dissertations on DVD from ProQuest / UMI. This poster will highlight best practice concerning access to PDF dissertations on disc. The poster will outline current procedures in provision of PDF dissertations on disc to consortia groups, including: most successful selection processes of dissertations among member libraries; data delivery options; development and customisation of local access portals; integration with library systems; and outreach and promotional work to ensure ongoing institution-wide access throughout all participating members. The poster will transfer knowledge of best practice in local provision and dissemination of PDF dissertations on disc.
Procurement of PDF dissertations on DVD provides a cost effective access, and perpetual archive solution for many library consortia, but requires close co-operation between libraries, investment in infrastructure and promotion.
Title: Scholarly Communication through ETDs: Perspectives from Developing Countries
Authors:
Kamani Perera, Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Sri Lanka
Dinesh Chandra, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India
The acceptance of electronic theses and dissertations – working rich digital documents in electronic form, submitting them electronically and “publishing” them digitally via the library – is growing around the globe as faculty, students, librarians and technologists see the advantage of digital scholarly communication (Lippincott, CNI). Librarians play a significant role in the modern world to spread the light among the users globally. It has become a challenging task to acquire, provide access, maintaining of digital objects in an electronic environment. E-documents as well as p-documents are giving paramount importance to its users in the world of scholarly communication. In this digital era, ETD can be defines as a specialized form of scholarly communication.
Through ETD program individual student can publicized their work through their respective university website. Future employers of these students can assess their work through the university Websites and students get global impact of their work. ETD programs help employers to recruit innovative people for their organizations. Developing an ETD program is not an easy task. It needs cooperation of many sectors of the university.
ETD can be easy to locate, any time, anywhere access and delivered over the Web. Due to the rapid development of networking and digital library technologies ETDs are obtaining progress in the universities globally. Most of the developing countries have realized the importance of establishing an ETD program and some have started local ETD programs. ETD can be printed thesis, which has been scanned and converted into PDF or recently completed work, which made available in word format and converted into PDF. These theses can be defined as born again or born digital theses. Audio and video materials can be included into born digital theses rather than born again one. ETDs enhance the quality, content, form and impact of scholarly communication. It helps for networking, computing multimedia and related technologies on scholarly communication.
Title: Electronic Theses and Dissertations: New Promotional Initiatives at the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, (PGIMER) Chandigarh, India
Author:
Raj Kumar, Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research (PGIMER), Chandigarh, India
The Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, (PGIMER) Chandigarh is an institute of national importance and known for medical education, research and patient care in India and abroad. The medical professionals of the institute play a major role in generation and dissemination of health information by conducting research work and producing MD, MS. DM, MCh and Ph D theses as a new information source.
The objectives of the study are that all residents/scholars should publish their research work electronically so that the hidden research work may become globally accessible for judging the quality of research work and avoiding its duplication. The electronic theses and dissertations will become suitable for machine archives and worldwide retrieval. The required infrastructure will be upgraded in the institute library to fulfill the need of ETD. The institute library will take the help of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) an international organization involved in the promotion, adoption, creation, use, dissemination and preservation of electronic analogues to traditional paper based theses and dissertations. Systematic strategies will be needed to persuade the institute library to participate in the resource-sharing movement and also play a leading role in developing ETD systems and directing a collaborative network.
Title: Intute Repository Search: Easy Access to Academic and Research Content
Author:
Sophia Jones, SHERPA, University of Nottingham
Researchers are increasingly making their work freely available on the internet, by depositing their research output into institutional repositories. Intute Repository Search is a JISC-funded beta search service which helps the academic community search across all these repositories in one go, thus providing a free and easy access to a wealth of academic, educational and research outputs from a wide range of institutions in the UK and where appropriate, globally. Repositories provide a means for traditional publishing to co-exist with Open Access, with peer review unaffected. Therefore, the more institutional repositories that are developed and used, the better for the research community. This poster will show that Intute Repository Search aggregates metadata from institutional and research repositories and links and exposes them by exploring (and exploiting) a range of available search technologies and structured metadata approaches.
At present, Intute Repository Search serves as a showcase for UK research output. It offers simple search and advanced search, but aims to develop personalised alerts and repurposed content streams into other websites, using leading edge discovery and personalised technologies. Intute Repository Search also investigates innovative technological solutions to support better cross-repository searching/browsing/exploration, including social semantic tagging mechanisms, text-mining and automatic metadata classification. Furthermore, over the 3 year period for the project, the objectives are to identify and develop machine-to-machine interface; achievable synergies between research and learning object repositories; opportunities from international collaboration in this area; scalable and flexible search infrastructure / service supporting a number of stakeholder constituencies; and tools to establish metrics for cross-searching / support for research appraisal process, among others. IRS is a project led by the University of Manchester (Mimas service: Intute), with the University of Bath (UKOLN) and the University of Nottingham (SHERPA).
Title: SHERPA services
Author:
Bill Hubbard, SHERPA Manager, University of Nottingham
Objective: To support open access repository development and use and improve the quality of service that repositories are able to provide.
Methods: By engaging with the user communities - repository managers, academics, librarians, publishers, research funders, and open access advocates a set of improvements and developments SHERPA services have been identified.
Results: This poster summarises the key developments which are taking place in SHERPA services.
The work of SHERPA is well known in the UK in supporting the establishment of a network of repositories in many of the UK research-led institutions; in outreach and advocacy activities and in the provision of a set of open access services.
This poster presents an overview of the open access services which are maintained and developed by the SHERPA core team at the University of Nottingham.
These include RoMEO, JULIET and OpenDOAR. RoMEO summarises copyright policy information from publishers regarding open access archiving. JULIET lists and analyses funders' requirements regarding open access to research outputs. OpenDOAR lists and analyses the world's academic open access repositories.
Recent funding developments mean that work is now under way on each of these services to develop the information that they hold and facilities that they provide. Romeo is working with volunteers and funders from around the world to increase the coverage of its holdings and with technologists to improve the functionality and services that it offers. Juliet has recently upgraded to include information on data archiving policies and open access publishing policies from research funders: it is similarly working with information from around the world to increase its coverage. OpenDOAR is being developed to include statistical data and working with repository administrators to help them improve the quality of their own repositories.
SHERPA is proud to say that these services have been identified as vital components in the global open access infrastructure and they were singled out in the award to SHERPA of the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Contribution to Scholarly Communication in 2007.
Title: RSP -- Repositories Support Project
Author:
Bill Hubbard, RSP Manager, University of Nottingham
Objective: To support repository development in the UK
Methods: The RSP is a central JISC funded project to support repository development of all types in the UK. RSP provides advice, information and support to repository managers and others who are developing the UK infrastructure.
Results: This poster summarises the key outputs and services from the RSP for the benefit of repository managers.
The Repositories Support Project is a JISC-funded project to coordinate and deliver good practice and practical advice to English and Welsh HEIs to enable the implantation, management and development of digital institutional repositories.
The RSP is consulting with the community at large in order to ensure institutions can be effectively supported whatever their repository type or stage of maturity. A databank of expertise, know-how and best practice is being built at the project website -- www.rsp.ac.uk.
This poster summarises the information and support that the RSP can give to individual institutions. This includes an outreach programme, offering consultancy-style visits to offer practical advice on any aspect of repository set-up, development, integration or promotion. The RSP also runs a series of professional briefing events on topics to assist repository management and development, together with focused workshops on practical issues like copyright, a summer school, and other outreach activities. The website provides information on building repositories, expanding content and practical advice on increasing usage. There is also a wiki page for each institution to enable repository managers to share thoughts and issues with their peers.
Talking to international colleagues has shown that a centralised support service for a country is a relative rarity, but one that can help coordinate and integrate repository infrastructure. We are very happy to talk to colleagues from other countries about our own experience and the way in which the project has worked so far.
The RSP is also pleased to hear from individual repository managers at whatever their stage of development and is helping to build a community of information and experience for all.
Title: Factors influencing the adoption and development of ETD programs in university libraries
Author:
Jamal Alsalmi, Victoria University of Wellington
This poster illustrates the framework for understanding the positive and negative factors affecting the adoption and development of ETD programs with particular reference to the situation in the Arab Gulf States. The author will discuss the interrelated technological, administrative and cultural factors in detail during his presentation on Thursday 5th June.
Title:Making ETDs More Usable for Students in a Multilingual World
Authors:
Ryan Richardson, Venkat Srinivasan, Xiaoyu Zhang, Weihua Zhu, Sung Hee Park, Pramodh Pochu, Siva Sanagavarapu, Mustafa Rafique, Min He, Jiao Jiao, Edward Fox
Digital Library Research Laboratory, Virginia Tech, USA
At the Virginia Tech Digital Libraries Research Laboratory, we are advancing research on several fronts to make ETDs more accessible and usable for students and researchers, both in English and across languages. As part of ongoing work to make ETDs available across languages, we are automatically producing concept maps from ETDs written in English, and then automatically translating them into Spanish using phrase lists automatically mined from ETD collections from Mexican universities. We are extending this work from English→Spanish to English → Chinese by mining translations of Chinese words and phrases in the computing and telecommunication domains.
We are using text mining techniques to help identify more relevant ETDs for users from large ETD collections, thus resulting in increased precision and recall.
We are also developing software to harvest ETDs from NDLTD, to extract specific information from ETDs (e.g. “Future Work” , “Problem Statement” etc.) and to recommend papers similar to users’ interests.
Title: EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service)
Authors:
The EThOSnet Project Team
EThOS is a system funded by JISC, CURL and seven project partners, to bring the UK to the forefront of international e-theses provision.
There are relatively few theses in the UK available in electronic format via the Internet. Consequently, some of the most innovative UK research output is virtually invisible. (The results of UK doctoral level research projects are not promoted as well as they could be meaning that few researchers across the world make use of this research; the authors of the PhD theses are little known; and in view of such lack of publicity, potential sponsors may be reluctant to fund similar research in future.)
In contrast, EThOS will make UK theses available on open access for global use. EThOS will allow UK theses to take their place online, alongside those in other European countries and elsewhere, ensuring that the UK contributes to and benefits from a much greater level of engagement with research worldwide.
For libraries, EThOS offers assurance that electronic theses can be discovered, accessed, managed and preserved, exploiting the strengths of universities and of the British Library to save both time and space.
The system will enable students, researchers, and in fact anyone else with an interest in post graduate research theses material, to search the EThOS and to access, from the desktop, the full text, in secure format, of electronically stored theses, following selection. It will also enable UK Higher Education institutions, in partnership with the British Library, to promote their post graduate research and increase usage of their theses output.
Title: Electronic theses at the University of St Andrews: institutional infrastructure, policy and support to establish an electronic theses service
Author:
Janet Aucock, University of St Andrews
Electronic deposit of PhD theses in St Andrews was introduced in academic session 2006/7 and
mandated as part of University regulations for the delivery and deposit of thesis research outputs within the institution.
This poster describes how our thesis service has developed and how the institutional framework has been put in place to support the service. It suggests key factors which must be addressed to enable such a service to grow and become embedded in institutional practice.
Title: Ontology based Information Retrieval System for ETDs in Vidyanidhi Digital Library
Author:
Shalini Urs, University of Mysore
In this poster, we present a description of an Ontology based Information Retrieval System that was designed for enhancing the search experience for ETDs in the Vidyanidhi Digital Library Collection in the domain of Agriculture. Deviating from the regular approach of developing ontologies on the basis of domain knowledge, the present poster demonstrates a novel method for developing ontologies from the semantic information available in the titles of digital documents ETDs. The keywords from the title were selected; classes and subclasses to which these keywords belonged were defined using handbooks and subject classification systems. The ontology was implemented in the OWL Web Ontology Language using the Protégé-OWL editor and the ontology was mapped with AGROVOC thesaurus of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The knowledge structures obtained above evolved into Description Logics based knowledge representation (KR) formalisms Description Logics based reasoners are employed for drawing inferences from the knowledge representation derived above. We used Pellet, a capable OWL-DL reasoner for deriving inferences.
Title: EMBED
Authors:
The Embed Project Team
'Embed' is a collaborative project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee as part of the JISC 'Repositories and Preservation Programme'. The Embed project is investigating, creating and testing a service model designed to:
• speed up the development and acceptance of institutional repositories amongst researchers
• discover how best to embed repositories into researchers' workflow processes and institutions' infrastructures
Partners in the project include Cranfield University, which has an IR (CERES) which contains over 1000 ETDs, and The Robert Gordon University, which has an IR (OpenAIR@RGU) which has a thesis which has been viewed over 1000 times within a few months of being made available. Both of these IRs include theses alongside a range of other types of research output and the poster on display at ETD 2008 illustrates the key themes of:
• inclusiveness (in terms of material type)
• widening access ('Be seen... Be read... Be cited...)
• proof of usage (statistics)
• advocacy and communication (involving the providers of the content)