Creating and Evaluating Metadata for a Large Legacy Thesis Collection: From “Vocational Agriculture” (1922) to “Microemulsion-Mediated Syntheses” (2004)

Abstract

In the summer of 2012, Texas A&M University Libraries uploaded more than 16,000 retrospectively-digitized masters-level theses, dating from 1922 to 2004, into our DSpace institutional repository. A Retrospective Theses collection was added to the repository to house these new items, within the Office of Graduate Studies’ existing DSpace community.

Item records for the Retrospective Theses collection were created by mapping existing MARC records, then transforming and enhancing this metadata. Records included fields encoded in our Qualified Dublin Core schema, as well as the custom Thesis schema developed by the TDL member consortium. MODS metadata records were also generated, to be stored as bitstreams.

This poster will: (1) give an overview of the processes employed to create metadata item records for this large collection of legacy masters theses; (2) preview efforts to improve upon metadata for the collection. We expect this case study of our previous and ongoing efforts around metadata for the Retrospective Theses to be helpful to institutions seeking to establish or adjust digital collections of legacy theses.