Susan Copeland: E-Theses Developments in the UK |
Finally, in 2003, the efforts of many of the individuals were rewarded when the UK‘s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) provided a substantial amount of funding to allow three major ETD project to commence. The financial support has been forthcoming as part of the ’Focus on Access to Institutional Resources‘ (FAIR) programme which aims to evaluate and explore different mechanisms for disclosure and sharing of content (and the related challenges) to fulfil the vision of a web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available to the whole community of learning<7>
To focus the work being undertaken as part of the ’FAIR‘ programme, the projects have been arranged into a number of ’clusters‘. The ETD related projects form part of the ’E-prints and e-theses cluster‘ which comprises:
· Daedalus (A project being undertaken by the University of Glasgow to provide exemplars for the development of a network of different data providers for a range of institutional assets to be exploited by a local harvesting service)<8>
· e-prints UK (A project to develop a national service through which the HE and FE communities can access the collective output of e-print papers available from compliant OAI repositories provided by UK universities and colleges)<9>
· Electronic Theses (A project involving a consortium led by The Robert Gordon University to evaluate a wide range of existing practice and methods of e-theses production , management and use against a set of criteria in order to produce recommended models for use within the UK information environment)<10>
· HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. (A project at the University of Strathclyde to support research into the design, development and implementation of a pilot service to provide stable ongoing UK-wide access to locally created learning and research resources in HE and FE institutions in Scotland)<11>
· SHERPA: (A project that aims to create a substantial corpus of research papers from several of the leading research institutions in the UK by establishing e-print archives which comply with the OAI PMH using eprints.org software)<12>
· TARDIS: (A project at the University of Southampton to investigate strategies to overcome the technical, cultural and academic barriers which currently restrict the development of institutional e-print archives and will develop a working model of a multi-disciplinary institutional archive)<13>
· Theses Alive!: (A project at the University of Edinburgh which aims to examine the use of OAI-compliant software designed to handle electronic thesis metadata and seeks to adapt and develop the software for use across the UK <14>
Representatives from the ’Daedalus‘ project, the ’Electronic Theses‘ project and ’Theses Alive!‘ are at this conference and will be giving presentations detailing their specific aims and findings to date. Therefore, for further information about current ETD activities in the UK, I would strongly recommend attending one of the talks by the above speakers.
Footnotes: | |
---|---|
<7> | JISC ’Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme‘ Web page (6 May 2003) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=programme_fair |
<8> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=project_daedalus |
<9> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name= project_eprints_uk |
<10> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name= project_rgu_etd |
<11> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name= project_hairst |
<12> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name= project_sherpa |
<13> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name= project_tardis |
<14> | http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name= project_thesis_alive |
© This publication and its compilation in form and content is copyrighted. Every realization which is not explicitly allowed by copyright law requires a written agreement. Especially, this holds for reprography and processing / storing by electronic systems.
ETD Proceeding DTD |
HTML - Version create: Fri May 16 14:36:37 2003 |