The DART-Europe E-theses Portal

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The DART-Europe E-theses Portal

• Martin Moyle
• Digital Curation Manager
• UCL Library Services
• UK
• e-mail m.moyle_at_ucl.ac.uk

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DART-Europe E-theses Portal 1

• Developed during first phase of DART-Europe, 2006
• Raised a number of issues...

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Portal 1 some issues

• Simple DC harvesting
• Data usually rich and well-organised at source
• But then has to be forced into simple DC
• Inconsistency of interpretation
• Inconsistency of usage
• Working with consortia does help to mitigate
  these issues
• No shared vocabulary for subject descriptions
• How to identify research theses?
• Ideally these would correspond to a DC set
• Not always the case
• What is a research thesis, anyway?
  Qualifications differ across Europe what about
  research Masters, post-doctoral theses...

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DART-Europe response

• A pragmatic solution keep things simple
• Start with a basic discovery and linking service
• Reintroduce the complexity at a later stage
• Focus on the essentials
• At the Portal level, users need
• to search author, title, abstract
• to limit search by institution, date language,
  if possible
• to link to full text
• Can rely on local jump-off page for additional
  metadata, eg award, MIME type(s), rights
  statements

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DART-Europe E-theses Portal 2

• http//www.dart-europe.eu
• Uses off-the-shelf harvesting software
• Daily updates
• Easy to add content
• Includes records from DiVA and CBUC consortia,
  and UCL
• Records from DNB and Trinity College Dublin to
  follow soon
• Other DART-Europe partners welcome to contribute
• Some cosmetic work in progress on the interface
• No substantive technical development without
  funding
• Demo...

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DART-Europe Portal what next? Technical.

• Multilingual aspects
• Translated interface
• Multilingual storage, search and retrieval issues
• Standardisation of OAI data at source
  repositories
• Subject descriptors
• No point imposing common subject headings on
  contributors
• Can we do some work on deriving these?
• Incorporate more data elements, eg supervisors
• Search/browse by country
• Alerts (RSS/email)
• ...and lots more.
• Development funding required for most of the
  above.

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DART-Europe Portal what next? Policy

• Collecting policy
• research theses? doctoral theses? metadata-only
  records? any technical/cost implications of
  these decisions?
• What do users really want from a European
  e-theses portal? How can we find out? Again,
  what are the technical/cost implications of
  providing it?
• Usage is it being used? By whom?
• Marketing when does the demonstrator become a
  service? How should it be marketed, and who will
  pay?
• Sustainability? Especially if additional
  investment is made in technical development,
  and/or we start to market the Portal as a service

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Further information

• DART-Europe Web site
• http//www.dartington.ac.uk/dart
• Portal
• http//www.dart-europe.eu
• Email m.moyle_at_ucl.ac.uk
• Thank you