Browsing by Subject "electronic theses and dissertations"
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Item Collaboration in Education: Creating a Searchable Database for Dissertations(2015-04-27) Brown, Sarah Engledow; Texas A&M University-Corpus ChristiTexas A&M University Corpus Christi is a member of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate. This is a consortium of colleges who offer the Ed.D. degree. As part of the CPED, the College of Education asked me to help create a database of dissertations for this project using our Institutional Repository. In this presentation, I describe the process of putting this project together, including challenges and victories, from the beginning of the project to its publicationItem Developing a Common Submission System for ETDs in the Texas Digital Library(2007-05-30) Mikeal, Adam; Brace, Tim; Texas A&M University; University of Texas at AustinThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) 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 faculty. 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 schema. 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 June of 2007. Demonstrators of the application are expected to be deployed in fall of 2007 at three schools.Item ETD Embargoes: A Comparison of Institutional Policies and Practices(2013-05-09) Larrison, Stephanie; Hammons, Laura; Henry, Geneva; Texas State University; Texas A&M University; Rice UniversityETD embargoes policies and practices vary widely among institutions. Although institutional websites often make embargo policies quite clear, the practices that support those policies is less so. Even more interesting, but less obvious, are the history and rational surrounding the development of embargo policies, as well as how exceptional cases and appeals for extensions, redactions, and permanent holds are handled. The Vireo ETD Submission and Management System is a flexible tool that can accommodate variations in ETD embargo policies and practices to support the needs of the institution. In this birds of a feather session, you will have an opportunity to learn the what, why, and how of embargo policy and management (both inside and outside of Vireo) from three different institutions.Item ETD Management in DSpace(2009-05-27) Mikeal, Adam; Creel, James; Maslov, Alexey; Phillips, Scott; Texas A&M UniversityThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a consortium of public and private educational institutions from across the state of Texas. Founded in 2005, TDL exists to promote the scholarly activities of its members. One such activity is the collection and dissemination of ETDs. A federated collection of ETDs from multiple institutions was created in 2006, and has since grown into an all-encompassing ETD Repository project that is partially supported by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). This project seeks to address the full life-cycle of ETDs, providing tools and services from the point of ingestion, through the review process, and finally to dissemination in the centrally federated repository. A primary component of this project was the development of Vireo, a web application for ETD submittal and management. Built directly into the DSpace repository, Vireo provides a customized submission process for students, and a rich, “Web-2.0″ style management interface for graduate and library staff. Because it is built directly in the DSpace repository, scalability is possible from a single department or college up to a multiple-institution consortium. In 2008, we reported the results of a demonstrator system that took place at Texas A&M University. Vireo has replaced the legacy application and is now the single point of entry for all theses and dissertations at that university. Rollout to other schools will follow a gradual, phased approach. This presentation examines the challenges faced as Texas A&M transitioned to a new ETD management system, and the architectural issues involved with scaling such a system to a statewide consortium. Finally, it will discuss the application’s release to the ETD community under an open-source license.Item Introducing Vireo: ETD Submittal and Management for DSpace(2009-07) Mikeal, Adam; Phillips, Scott; Leggett, John J.; McFarland, MarkThe 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.Item Lifecycle Management of ETDs: Toward a Collaborative Approach to Stakeholders' Involvment in ETDs Curation(2012-05-25) Alemneh, Daniel; Henry, Geneva; Stark, Shannon; University of North Texas; Rice UniversityElectronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) represent a wealth of scholarly and artistic content created by Master's and Doctoral students in the degree-seeking process. The successful management of ETDs requires effort across the entire lifecycle to ensure that ETDs are preserved and made accessible in a manner that today’s users expect. This poses challenges and presents opportunities to those who organize and provide access to ETDs. This presentation will highlight and discuss the early findings of an IMLS-funded project on Lifecycle Management of Electronic Theses and Dissertations. The project aims to enhance ETD curators’ and other institutional stakeholders’ knowledge and skills, by promoting best practices and creating tools that address specific needs in managing ETDs throughout their lifecycle. The project partners are the University of North Texas, the Educopia Institute, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, the Virginia Tech Libraries, Rice University, Boston College, Indiana State University, Penn State University, and the University of Arizona. They will develop and share a toolkit of guidelines, educational materials, and a set of software tools for life-cycle data management and preservation of ETDs. This project will take place over a two year period from October 2011 to September 2013.Item Pushing the Boundaries of Open Access(2014-03-14) Alemneh, Daniel; Phillips, Mark; Kleister, Jill; University of North TexasThe Open Access (OA) movement has become increasingly important in shaping the ways that academic libraries provide services to support the creation, organization, management and use of digital contents. The University of North Texas (UNT) has embraced the open access movement and seeks to bring scholarship to the widest possible audience. Our usage statistics show that users from more than 200 countries around the world visit the UNT Digital Libraries’ diverse collections. Theses and dissertations represent a wealth of scholarly and artistic content created by masters and doctoral students in the degree-seeking process. The University of North Texas (UNT) was one of the first three American universities to require electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) for graduation, and by 1999 all theses and dissertations submitted by students in pursuit of advanced degrees were digital. We are intensely proud of the work of our students. Currently, more than 90% of UNT’s ETDs are freely accessible to the public via the UNT Digital Library, while less than10% have been restricted by their authors for use by the UNT community only. In light of supporting academic institutions initiative to advance digital scholarship for worldwide research, we started a new project contacting UNT alumni who restricted their ETDs in perpetuity. We contacted about 700 ETD authors, asking their permission to remove the restrictions from their theses or dissertations and make them openly available in the UNT Digital Library. This poster provides a preliminary analysis of the UNT‘s efforts to make students’ work accessible to a wider global audience.Item Repository Interoperability in the Texas Digital Library Through the Use of OAI-ORE(2009-05-27) Maslov, Alexey; Creel, James; Mikeal, Adam; Phillips, Scott; Texas A&M UniversityOne of the more prominent projects undertaken by the Texas Digital Library is the creation and maintenance of a federated collection of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) from its member institutions. Currently, the maintenance of this collection is performed via a manual process, leading to scalability issues as the collection grows. The DSpace OAI Harvesting project was started with the aim of improving current federation methods. It relies on integrating two key technologies into the DSpace repository platform: OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE. The Open Archives Initiative’s (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a well-established mechanism for harvesting metadata between repository systems. The DSpace platform supports metadata dissemination through OAI-PMH, allowing collections to be regularly harvested by external agents such as Google, or the NDLTD’s Union Catalog of ETDs. This protocol’s ubiquity is well-deserved: it is simple and flexible, allowing for selective harvest by date ranges and sets, as well as specific metadata formats. Although dissemination through OAI-PMH has been a feature of DSpace for some time, harvesting support was missing, and was added as part of this project. As its name implies, OAI-PMH is concerned with metadata; it cannot transmit actual content. This need is addressed by another standard from OAI, called Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE). This protocol allows us to describe abstract sets of Web resources as nested groups called aggregations. The second part of this DSpace OAI Harvesting project was to make DSpace “ORE-aware”, so that when the harvesting engine encounters ORE descriptions, it is able to fetch the content from the remote repository and create a new local copy. This presentation will describe the OAI Harvesting project, and discuss its impact on the various TDL repositories, all of which use the DSpace platform. For the federated ETD collection, this technology will enable the maintenance of the collection to move from a manual process to an automatic one. It also opens up interesting possibilities for specializing various repositories for specific tasks; for example using a DSpace instance solely for ETD workflow and management and then harvesting the results into the main repository. Finally, we will discuss the impact of this project on repository architectures in general.Item Session 3A | TDL Services Rodeo(Texas Digital Library, 2021-05-26) Park, Kristi; Mumma, Courtney; Deforest, Lea; Woodward, Nicholas; Smutniak, Frank; Lauland, NickIn collaboration with our member institutions, Texas Digital Library (TDL) provides services and infrastructure that enable equitable access to and preservation of digital content of value to research, instruction, cultural heritage, and institutional memory. In this panel presentation, TDL leadership will be joined by TDL staff members who support these services to give attendees a roundup of quick-fire updates on TDL’s stable of services -- including what TDL has accomplished over the past year and what it has planned for the year ahead. Among other things, attendees will learn about: TDL’s newest metadata aggregation service for the Digital Public Library of America; Recent improvements to our institutional repository and academic journal hosting services; A pilot project to accommodate larger datasets in TDR through remote storage; Outcomes of the IMLS-funded Digital Preservation for Private and Sensitive Data project; Plans for accessibility assessments and improvements for all hosted applications; Efforts to provide simple pathways from our hosted repositories and journals to digital preservation storage; Updates on the roll-out of Vireo 4, and what’s coming next; Outcomes from TDL’s first two years of Open Education Network membershipItem Sharing Research Broadly: Three Minute Thesis (3MT®) at Texas A&M Universit(2014-03-14) Hammons, Laura; Texas A&M UniversityThe Three Minute Thesis (3MT®), initiated at the University of Queensland, Australia, is a competition in which graduate students attempt to convey the impact of their research to a general audience using compelling words and delivery – and, in just three minutes. Prompted by the Conference of Southern Graduate Schools, with the inclusion of a regional 3MT® competition at its 2014 Annual Meeting, Texas A&M University organized a campus-wide effort to promote, educate, and host a 3MT® competition. The 3MT® provides an excellent opportunity to promote graduate student thesis/dissertation research in transformative ways, while providing professional development to graduate students on the fine skills of orally and visually communicating the purpose and impact of their research to the world. As students generally engage in 3MT® efforts prior to or parallel with completing their degree programs, it also holds the potential – through collaborations among the Graduate School, Library, and others – to demonstrate to graduate student participants the value of scholarly communications, enrich the electronic thesis and dissertation with video that is more broadly appealing, etc. While Texas A&M University has only begun to consider these possibilities, the success of our first 3MT® competition holds promise for future initiatives. This poster will introduce the 3MT® program at Texas A&M University and consider the elements necessary for developing a successful initiative.Item Texas Digital Repository Services Update(2009-05-28) Steans, Ryan; Texas Digital LibraryThe Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a multi-university consortium formed to provide and support a fully online scholarly community for institutions of higher learning in Texas. The TDL is developing applications such as open-access institutional repositories, collections management tools, and an electronic thesis and dissertation submission and management system. The organization also promotes new scholarly communication models through faculty services such as blogs, wikis, and peer-reviewed electronic journals. The TDL has employed numerous open-source technologies in its tool-kit, from implementing DSpace as its platform for member repositories, to enabling cross-institution single sign-on for TDL members using the Shibboleth distributed authentication system. Other open-source platforms used by the TDL include WordPress, Open Journal Systems, and MediaWiki. Future plans include the implementation of Open Monograph Press and Open Conference Systems. This presentation will discuss the ways in which the TDL, by leveraging its commitment to open-source technologies and the principle of open access, is empowering its members to collect, preserve, and promote the scholarly output of Texas universities. By providing an update on the current status of TDL services for faculty and institutions, highlighting recent developments and outlining plans for expansion of services, we will describe how TDL is connecting users with digital libraries across the state, and how that effort is connecting Texas Digital Library with the worldItem UNT Libraries ETD Citation Analysis Project(2017-05-24) Andrews, Pamela; Klein, Janette; Harker, Karen; Alemneh, Daniel; University of North TexasThis presentation will explore the project plan for an upcoming citation analysis of University of North Texas Libraries' Electronic Thesis and Dissertation (ETD) Collection. The goal of this project is to create and implement a method for conducting citation analysis on ETDs for collection development purposes. The first stage of our project will be an analysis of ETDs for citations using items from the digital library. As the Portal to Texas History was launched in 2002, this will define our corpus sample from 2002 to present, providing over 6,000 ETDs for analysis. This pilot will allow us to test our method on a specific URL string target before expanding to collect broader citation data for analysis. In this presentation, I will briefly outline our goals, pilot study, and preliminary methodology.Item An Update on Development of the Vireo 4.x ETD Submission and Management System(2017-05-23) Creel, James; Huff, Jeremy; Savell, Jason; Welling, William; Laddusaw, Ryan; Hahn, Douglas; Bolton, Michael; Steans, Ryan; Larrison, StephanieThe Vireo ETD (Electronic Thesis and Dissertation) submission and management system, an open source project managed by the Texas Digital Library (TDL) has seen years of real-world use processing thousands of ETDs at dozens of institutions. In Fall of 2015, the Texas Digital Library and Texas A&M University began development on the 4.x release of Vireo. The biggest deliverables of the new version are to bring the application into a modern Web application stack, enable controlled vocabularies for metadata fields, and, most ambitiously, to allow a completely customizable workflow for every institution or degree program. The release of the latest version has faced delays on two fronts. First, the enormous complexity of designing a completely customizable workflow was not made manifest in initial planning. Second, the project staffing was disrupted when the lead developer left to pursue other career opportunities. Nevertheless, the project is nearing an initial release and is undergoing initial testing at several institutions. The feature set of Vireo 3 represents many years of experience and development. The Vireo 4.x effort to bring this enormous feature set into a modern Web application stack and introduce customizability in the workflow has entailed not only a comprehensive re-write of the code, but also significant design innovations. This presentation gives a preview of the 4.0 release demonstrating the impressive new capabilities of Vireo with customizable workflows and controlled vocabularies. It also discusses the software development process and how interested institutions can contribute.Item Vireo ETD Submission and Management System- Update 2010(2010-05-17) Nürnberg, Peter; Texas Digital LibraryThis presentation will provide an update regarding work done on the Vireo ETD system, its current maintenance status, and plans for Vireo for 2010 and beyond. Vireo is the TDL’s Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Submission and Management System. It allows students to easily submit their theses and dissertations online and provides management software for graduate offices and libraries to move the ETD through the approval workflow and publish the ETD in an institutional repository.Item Vireo ETD System Deployment Experiences(2010-06) Nürnberg, Peter J.; Leggett, John J.; McFarland, MarkThe Vireo electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) submittal and management system has been in use at several universities throughout the United States. Vireo was developed over the last several years at the Texas Digital Library (TDL), a consortium of public and private institutions throughout the state of Texas. The TDL has recently undertaken a Vireo productization effort. The result of this effort is both an updated software system and accompanying support in the form of documentation, training and support infrastructures. In this paper, we describe this effort. We first review the methodologies we used to undertake the effort itself. This review includes a discussion of the development and testing methodologies we employed for the Vireo system software, including those practices we found especially useful or problematic. We then describe the deployment of the software and support. Specifically, we describe the strategies we used to accommodate the roll-out of software to nearly 20 institutions nearly simultaneously, as well as how we managed the risks inherent in such a deployment. We also describe the development of training and support materials that allow us to scale these activities to our user community. Finally, we reflect on the unique challenges that the productization of an ETD system engenders relative to generic productization efforts. We conclude with recommendations for other organizations faced with development, deployment, maintenance and support of ETD systems.