4. Conclusion

In parallel to an increasing mass of submitted electronic theses, anomalies are more and more reported. This is justifying the necessity to think seriously about the risk of unavailability of content in future. The importance of a digital archiving problematic may be argued by the fact that as the CERIST ETDs is just setting so having a clear archiving plan as soon as possible will give the opportunity to avoid another more complex problematic of “managing the retrospective“ or the “past“. This last one is often very difficult to resolve without big dispenses.

It appears from the current survey and experiences we are conducting that international standards and concepts of digital archiving are effectively applied for the local context of the CERIST ETDs system. However an important effort is to do in order to decide for each concept or each standard the most appropriated solution and application way. In general two parameters are decisive for such a decision: the cost and the facility (less required skills). Regarding the fact that digital archiving cannot be separated from the other modules of capture, and processing and delivery, we need to adopt one generic and exhaustive ETD chain, in a model of NDLTD, Cybertheses, etc. The XML will constitute one major option of the CERIST ETDs system. As a perspectives we are targeting to:

• Make the student implied in the process of archiving. This starting from the principle that digital archiving is more and more facilitated and performed when it‘s observed in an early and upstream step of the chain. In this way we are trying to study the possibility of application and arabisation of the “The Guide for Electronic Theses and Dissertations“ hosted at the etdguide.org.
• Introduce the digital archiving life cycle concept.

Moreover the analysis of international models of ETDs archiving let us to extract some of important lessons and trends:

• At the opposite of “techniques“ and “standards“ issues, “methodology “ and “policy“ aspects of digital archiving still in a need of a development. Such aspects are very important in our context, where there is not enough budgets, means and skills in parallel to an urgent need to control a complex and massive academic dissertations.
• The rarity of literature in term of archiving ETDs experiences. International models of ETDs rarely described their archiving models. this leads us to recommend the encouragement of initiatives such the “UNESCO ETDs clearing house“ to encourage international communication and creation of spaces where it will be possible to share experiences, tools and ideas.
• The OAI concept seems constituting one of the most important future trend. So one of our future targets is to introduce an OAI-PMH into the CERIST ETDs System in order to link it with regional and international ETDs systems.

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