1. Virtual Day on Digital Theses 5 October 2007 – Mexico Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) – Edward A. Fox1, Executive Director Gail McMillan, Secretary Ryan Richardson, PostDoc Venkat Srinivasan, Graduate Research Asst.

2. Acknowledgements (selected)
Colleagues: Tony Atkins, Lillian Cassel, Debra Dudley, John Eaton, Lourdes Fernandez, Marcos Gonçalves, Ming Luo, Silvia González Marín, Uma Murthy, Doug Oard, Alfredo Sanchez, Craig Scott, Hussein Suleman, Alberto Castro Thompson, …
Sponsors: Dept. of Education (FIPSE), DFG, Elsevier, Google, IBM, IMLS, Microsoft, NSF (DUE , IIS , , , ), OCLC, RDEC/ACE, SOLINET, SUN, SURA, VTLS, …
Our efforts have been made possible through the support of sponsors, faculty, staff, and students. We gratefully acknowledge their assistance and collaboration. IBM has donated a large amount of equipment. The largest grants have come from NSF, FIPSE, and SURA. Content has been shared by ACM in a variety of efforts related to learning about computing. Many companies, like Adobe, Microsoft, and OCLC, have provided software and related assistance.
A large number of colleagues have worked on the various projects discussed. Students, serving as research assistants, preparing a thesis or dissertation, or engaged in class projects, have helped develop many of the systems and publications about Virginia Tech digital library initiatives.

3. Digital Libraries & ETDs
Project:
Networked Digital
Library of Theses
& Dissertations
(NDLTD)
Domain: graduate education, research
Genre:ETDs=electronic theses & dissertations
Benefits: ETD creators develop lifelong skills with DLs. Students, faculty, departments, & universities save money and gain visibility.

5. Importance of ETDs
Open access is natural and highly effective.Levels playing field, making research from every nation and university equally visible.
Promotes scholarship and understanding since research details are widely shared.
Quantity of content is comparable to that of the journal publishing enterprise.
Can leverage “electronic” for flexibility, expressivity, savings, and perservation.

6. Main Points
NDLTD was launched in 1996 to help with ETD activities worldwide.
It is a member organization, so we urge joining by all interested in digital theses.
Visible results, e.g., ETDs from Mexico accessible from the NDLTD Union Catalog (and then through Scirus, …), show that working together helps everyone.
NDLTD helps with training/education, conferences, standards, technologies, research, and leadership.

7. What are we doing?
Aiding universities to enhance graduate education, publishing, and IPR efforts
Helping improve the availability and content of theses and dissertations
Educating ALL future scholars so they can publish electronically and effectively use digital libraries (i.e., are Information Literate and can be more expressive) 2 3 4 4 4

9. What is an ETD? What it can look like:
What is an ETD? What it can look like:
It can have the appearance of a paper document.
It can contain a video clip.
It can contain sound.
It can contain thumbnail pages and links to aid navigation.
It can have a unique layout.
It can have photomicrographs.
It can contain a simulation.
The library resources used in an ETD initiative can include

10.
Unique layout
Links wing an doutside the work
What resources does it take to initiate and support ETDs?

11. Digital Objects (DOs) Born digital Word processors (e.g., Word)
XML, LaTex, BibTeX, and other processors
Multimedia authoring and capture tools
Digitized version of “real” object
Scanners, cameras, MRI, …
3D models, datasets, …
Renderings for presentation, preservation
PDF/A
ORE (Object Reuse and Exchange)

12. Metadata Objects (MDOs)
Dublin Core, and extension to ETD-MS
RDF
OAI (Open Archives Initiative) sharing
MARC
Crosswalks, mappings
Ontologies (to aid classification)

13. LOCKSS Lots of copies keep stuff safe
Initially at Stanford (Vicky Reich)
Initial focus on lower levels
Initial content: journals
Extending to ETDs (Gail McMillan)

14. OAI - Open Archives Initiative
Advocacy for interoperability
Standard for transferring metadata among digital libraries
Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH)
Standard for handling compound/complex objects like ETDs
ORE

15. OAI – Repository Perspective
Required: Protocol
Set Structure
URI Scheme
MDO
MDO
MDO
MDO
Required: DC
MDO
MDO
MDO
MDO DO DO DO DO

16. OAI – Black Box Perspective

17. The World According to OAI
Service Providers
Discovery
Current
Awareness
Preservation
harvesting
Metadata
Data Providers

18. Software Options ETD-db (Virginia Tech; also in Spanish)
Customized into ADT solution (Australia)
-> future
Many local / commercial solutions
Digital libraries or institutional repositories
Eprints, Greenstone, Fedora/Fez, …
DSpace (MIT, HP Labs)

23. Institutional Repositories - 1
“Institutional repositories are digital collections that capture and preserve the intellectual output of a single university or a multiple institution community of colleges and universities.”
Crow, R. “Institutional repository checklist and resource guide”, SPARC, Washington, D.C., USA

24. Institutional Repositories - 2
“A university-based institutional repository is a set of services that a university offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution.”
Lynch, C.A. In ARL Bimonthly Report 226, pp. 1-7, Feb. 2003,

25. Software Issues Be sure: Request support for
Can export metadata using OAI-PMH
Is a sustainable solution
Allows open access and preservation
Request support for
Flexible workflow management
Scope: just ETDs <-> institutional memory
Scope: time coverage -- authoring, reviewing, submission, defense presentation

26. Student Gets Committee Signatures and Submits ETD
Approval
form
Signed
Grad School/
Library/IT 10

27. Digital library access control
Library Catalogs ETD, Access is
Opened to the New Research
WWW
NDLTD
Digital library access control 12

28. Union catalog: OCLC
(sets of ETDs)
Is getting data from WorldCat (so, from many sites!).
Will harvest from all others who contact them.
Need DC and either ETD-MS or MARC.

31. OCLC SRU Interface

33. ETD Union Search Mirror Site in China (CALIS) (http://ndltd.calis.edu.cn – popular site!)

34. VTLS and Content Languages
The VTLS browse/search service has data in many different languages. These include:
English
German
Greek
Korean
Portuguese

35. Language = German; hits = 137

38. ETDs: Library Goals Improve library services Better turn-around time
Always available
Reduce work
catalog from e-text
eliminate handling: mailing to ProQuest, bindery prep, check-out, check-in, reshelving, etc.
Save space
ETDs give libraries an avenue to demonstrate Information Age goals

40. The Concept Map: From learning tool to cross-language knowledge discovery tool
Problem:
Finding interesting ETDs written in Language1 may be difficult for Language2 speakers, and vice versa.
NDLTD has > 360,000 ETDs in > 12 languages.
Many TDs from the Spanish speaking world are not yet in NDLTD, e.g., UNAM in Mexico City has 50,000+ ETDs .
ETDs exist in many languages, but discovery and summarizing across languages is even more difficult.
Maybe shift URL for NDLTD to not be in red, so is more readable
Add comma after “e.g.”

41. Cross-language Experiment - 1
English version of ETD by Saraiya

42. Cross-language Experiment - 2
Spanish (automatic) translation of ETD by Saraiya

43. Cmap Study Summary Using NLP tools and a domain-specific ontology
We have been able to automatically produce concept maps for large documents (ETDs).
For the cross-language case, using
Phrase translations mined from ETD collection
Off-the-shelf MT tools
We have been able to automatically produce & translate concept maps that allowed users to determine relevance of ETDs better than using machine-translated abstracts alone.
Google will support further R&D.

44. Problems Solved/Solvable
Plagiarism
Concern over quality
Concern about publishers
Intellectual property rights management
Handling restricted works
Pilot -> Recommendation -> Requirement
Inertia, lack of vision/leadership

45. Appeal
Join NDLTD
Move forward (in stages) so all theses and dissertations in Mexico lead to open ETDs.
Make all metadata accessible through the NDLTD Union Catalog.
Let NDLTD know how we can help!
PREGUNTAS?