2. Creation of web-based catalog of Fielding dissertations

Source and preparation of the data

Because the Fielding Graduate Institute never had a physical library, it never deployed a traditional online public access catalog (OPAC). The metadata about its students‘ dissertation was, and continues to be, stored primarily in the institution's ERP system, which utilizes the software Datatel Colleague (http://www.datatel.com). It is stored here effectively as one (of many) attributes of the student, more specifically, of the student‘s dissertation committee.

Figure 3: Sample record for a dissertation from Datatel (confidential data intentionally obscured).

A script that automatically runs nightly extracts data needed for the web-based catalog of Fielding dissertations from several tables of Datatel, and stores it in a comma-separated values (CSV) file: author‘s first and last name, academic program abbreviation (e.g., HOD for Human & Organization Development), degree awarded (e.g., Ph.D.), month/year degree awarded, and dissertation title.^<4>

Using a Microsoft Access macro, the CSV file is then imported into a Microsoft Access database; extraneous data is removed to make the file as compact as possible; data types are changed (to assure that, for example, the text string “01/00“ - of which only the year is used and converted to four digits, i.e., 2000 - is sorted as a numeric field); and indexes are added.

Figure 4: Microsoft Access macro for generating database „behind“ web-based catalog of Fielding dissertations

This database is then uploaded (using FTP) to the Fielding Graduate Institute WWW server once a month.

ASP-based web page generates web-based catalog

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) coding, which is shown in the Appendix, generates the web page that presents the web-based dissertation catalog‘s input form, as well as the output of the query, at http://www.fielding.edu/library/dissertations/.

Figure 5: Section of web-based dissertation catalog input screen, with sample search for „cohes“ in the dissertation title

Figure 6: Section of web-based dissertation catalog output screen, with results of sample search for „cohes“ in the dissertation title

Footnotes:
<4>	The „key words“ assigned to the dissertation by the author are also stored, but not included in the web-based catalog, because this assignment was not done for over half of the dissertations, and the keywords are not selected from a controlled vocabulary.

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