1. Submission and Creation of Metadata for Theses in the DiVA System

Two kinds of doctoral theses are produced at Swedish universities: monographs and summaries. The summaries consist of a number of individual papers and an independent summary. In Uppsala the summaries are primarily published in five series, one from each faculty, called “Comprehensive summaries of Uppsala dissertations from the faculty of ...“

The Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University has through decisions in 2000 and 2002 stipulated that all new theses must be posted electronically and that all comprehensive summaries are to be published on the Internet. Monographs can be published electronically on a voluntary basis.

1.1 Posting

Posting on the Internet of doctoral theses at Uppsala University must take place at least three weeks before the day when the thesis is to be publicly defended, and the thesis must also be available in printed form for reviewing at the university library.^<2>

The basis for posting can be delivered as a file created from a template (developed for the DiVA Publishing System) or as another file that includes the original text (if the doctoral student does not have access to any of the platforms used for the templates or cannot use the templates at all). In both cases the file must be sent to the Electronic Publishing Centre at least a couple of days in advance, in order for the doctoral student to obtain a receipt when the printed copies of the thesis are delivered at the University Library, which is a condition for posting.

1.2 Templates

Form-based templates for MS Word, Open Office, Star Office, and LaTeX have been developed for posting. To assure high quality metadata several controls are added to the forms including drop-down menus with controlled values for names of publication types, degrees, departments, addresses, series, and distributors. Other templates are used for the creation of the actual contents (the full-text document).

The templates used for posting produce XML files that contain all metadata regarding the thesis, the author, and the public defence of the thesis. The XML files are stored in the DiVA Document Format. Through XSLT and XSL-FO these files are used in various contexts where metadata needs to be extracted, e.g. for the creation of title pages, cover pages, edition notices of the printed and electronic publications; web pages and so on. (See ).

1.3 The DiVA Document Format

The DiVA Document Format is an internal metadata format that was developed in the project since other existing formats considered did not include all the features needed for the DiVA Publishing System. The format, described in XML Schema^<3>, is component based and extensible. Some inspiration has been gathered from the work concerning Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, FRBR^<4>, by IFLA. For instance all formats of the document (printed as well as electronic ones) are described within the same record as “manifestations“.

From the DiVA Document Format also the necessary bibliographic data for library systems, which will be closer looked at below, can be created.

Footnotes:
<2>	See: http://info.uu.se/Internt.nsf/5c6cb794ca96404fc125680e004836ad/56588f26f92ec1d0c1256c6e00456886/$FILE/Beslut.pdf
<3>	See: http://publications.uu.se/schema/1.0/diva.xsd
<4>	See: http://www.ifla.org/VII/s13/frbr/frbr.htm

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