UCL LIBRARY SERVICES The DARTEurope Etheses Portal Martin
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES The DART-Europe E-theses Portal Martin Moyle Digital Curation Manager UCL Library Services UK e-mail: m. moyle@ucl. ac. uk
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES DART-Europe E-theses Portal #1 q Developed during first phase of DART -Europe, 2006 q Raised a number of issues. . .
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES Portal #1 – some issues q Simple DC harvesting q Data usually rich and well-organised at source q But then has to be forced into simple DC q Inconsistency of interpretation q Inconsistency of usage q. Working with consortia does help to mitigate these issues q No shared vocabulary for subject descriptions q How to identify research theses? q Ideally these would correspond to a DC set q. Not always the case q What is a research thesis, anyway? Qualifications differ across Europe; what about research Masters, post-doctoral theses. . .
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES DART-Europe response q A pragmatic solution: keep things simple q Start with a basic discovery and linking service q Reintroduce the complexity at a later stage q Focus on the essentials q At the Portal level, users need: q to search author, title, abstract q to limit search by institution, date; language, if possible q to link to full text q Can rely on local “jump-off” page for additional metadata, eg award, MIME type(s), rights statements
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES DART-Europe E-theses Portal #2 q http: //www. dart-europe. eu q Uses off-the-shelf harvesting software q Daily updates q Easy to add content q Includes records from Di. VA and CBUC consortia, and UCL q Records from DNB and Trinity College Dublin to follow soon q Other DART-Europe partners welcome to contribute q Some cosmetic work in progress on the interface q No substantive technical development without funding q Demo. . .
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES DART-Europe Portal: what next? Technical. q Multilingual aspects q Translated interface q Multilingual storage, search and retrieval issues q Standardisation of OAI data at source repositories q Subject descriptors q No point imposing common subject headings on contributors q Can we do some work on deriving these? q Incorporate more data elements, eg supervisors q Search/browse by country q Alerts (RSS/email) q. . . and lots more. q Development funding required for most of the above.
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES DART-Europe Portal: what next? Policy q Collecting policy q research theses? doctoral theses? metadata-only records? any technical/cost implications of these decisions? q 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? q Usage – is it being used? By whom? q Marketing: when does the demonstrator become a service? How should it be marketed, and who will pay? q Sustainability? Especially if additional investment is made in technical development, and/or we start to market the Portal as a service
UCL LIBRARY SERVICES Further information q DART-Europe Web site: http: //www. dartington. ac. uk/dart q Portal: http: //www. dart-europe. eu q Email: m. moyle@ucl. ac. uk q Thank you
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