Preface

DiVA-Digitala vetenskapliga arkivet (DiVA Archive)-is a comprehensive description of a searchable archive containing all documents which are published in an electronic form at Uppsala University in Sweden. Other Swedish universities are also co-operating in the project within the DiVA framework. One part of this archive is the database containing theses published at Uppsala University from 1998 to date.

In September 2000 an Electronic Publishing Centre was established at Uppsala University Library. Its primary assignment was a project in which technical solutions, and a well-functioning workflow, for electronic posting and full-text publication of doctoral theses, essays, working papers and other types of scientific publications were to be created.

The first phase of the project was completed in 2002 and the result was the DiVA Publishing System - a system for electronic publishing of different types of publications.

Metadata records from the DiVA system are distributed to services which are relevant for the dissemination of information about the research activities of Uppsala University and other participating partners.

This paper will describe the creation process in general of metadata regarding doctoral theses in the DiVA system, and more specifically how the data submitted by the author can be reused for bibliographic information in library systems.

The idea of reusing of information from the source publication is not completely new. We can see a connection to CIP^<1> (Cataloguing in Publication - an old idea from the seventies), where a catalogue record, which could be reused for the cataloguing of the actual item, was printed directly on the verso of the title page of the source publication. Although the records could be distributed in machine readable form, the initial cataloguing was always carried out by a cataloguer and quite often the information would be retyped by another cataloguer on a card or in a library system. This was a part of our inspiration when we started thinking of a new workflow for electronic publishing and about the possibilities of reusing of the information submitted by the author.

Three years ago, when we started experimenting with this new workflow, cataloguers were not completely happy about the idea, at least not in the case of Uppsala University Library. Some of them were very sceptical to the capabilities of the new technology to produce good quality records, some of them were sceptical to the skills of our developer team; some of them were simply worried about the future of the cataloguers as a profession. However, the attitude has changed in the course of time. The DiVA development team consists not only of system developers and graphic arts designers, but also of former cataloguers. This made it easier to communicate within the library. Now this workflow is highly accepted and our colleagues can concentrate on more qualified tasks when cataloguing theses (indexing and classification) instead of retyping the bibliographical information.

The results presented here have been achieved in co-operation with the Royal Library - the National Library of Sweden.

Footnotes:
<1>	See: http://cip.loc.gov/cip/

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