JISC

Start date: 1 August 2002

End date: 31 October 2004

Funding programme: Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) programme

Project website: http://www.thesesalive.ac.uk

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Introduction

This project will examine the use of OAI-compliant software designed to handle electronic thesis metadata. Various open-source software packages are now in use which permit individual institutions to disclose metadata about their institutional theses and dissertations. The Theses Alive! Project will seek to adapt and develop one of these for use across the UK. It will develop a pilot national service which will have the aim of supporting electronic theses (e-theses) creation and management for UK universities. 

We recognise that there are particular characteristics to the UK environment for thesis metadata (largely because of the well-known services of the British Library and of the Index to Theses) which suggest that a national approach may be the most effective way of enabling universities to produce multi-purpose thesis metadata, to accept the need to develop procedures and systems to accommodate e-theses, and to ensure that the advocacy work required to generate e-thesis content is deployed with maximum efficiency. The Project will therefore work both to create the submission software required to make the disclosure of theses metadata as simple as possible, and to secure the take-up of the system and – through it - of electronic theses production and management generally in UK HE. The Project will complement the work of the Electronic Theses project led by the Robert Gordon University.

Aims and Objectives

Aims  

Through its British Thesis Service, the British Library has for many years offered UK universities a service which was national in scale. However, it has not yet taken advantage of the availability of the networked digital environment, and we consider that JISC, representing UK Higher Education, has an opportunity at the present time to promote the adoption of this environment by universities in order that theses can be provided online for the benefit of international research and scholarship. JISC can coordinate a national system which caters to the needs of researchers and meshes with the hybrid library environments currently being developed by university libraries through the provision of a new service, Theses Alive! We recommend that this system be based upon a distributed model, with the chosen software being made available to universities for the provision both of a metadata submission system, and a full-text repository for those universities wishing to use it. 

Objectives  

The Project’s objectives are: 

Overall Approach

The Project will be based around a core team of three staff at the University of Edinburgh – a Project Director, Project Officer and Systems Developer. The Project will work with a group of pilot universities who will take delivery of the Theses Alive! software for use in their institutions, and populate it with their own ETD data, assisting the Project team with product evaluation and user feedback. During the development of the software, and afterwards, the Project will work to provide a general information and user support service on ETDs for UK HE as a whole.

Project Consortium

Theses Alive! is not a consortium, being based within the SELLIC Project in Edinburgh University Library. However, the Project will work with non-funded partners, viz:

• Supplier of open-source submission software
• Universities involved in piloting the system
• Theses metadata agencies: the British Library’s British Thesis Service, and Learned Information, publisher of the Index to Theses.

End-user interests will be represented via the pilot sites. Each pilot site will be asked to nominate a group of end-users (i.e. research supervisors and postgraduate students) as well as ‘technical users’ (i.e. library and IT staff). The Project Officer will visit each pilot site and convene meetings with end-users and technical users in the course of the Project.