An Update on Development of the Vireo 4.x ETD Submission and Management System

Abstract

The 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.