Sink or swim

Abstract

In 2002, the Australian Digital Theses Program (ADT) was formally established by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). The ADT Program is enabling libraries to demonstrate new roles in scholarly communications in the fast evolving information environment. This has been a major benefit of the ADT Program and a focus for CAUL. Libraries involved in the ADT Program have been able to demonstrate new facilitating and leadership roles with the scholarly community, as well as developing new forms of collaborative activities. This is stimulating other ways of making universities' research publications available, including the development of institutional research repositories. The ADT Program has provided a timely focus on the hybrid nature of library services. The research community is advocating expansion of the ADT metadata repository to include information about theses in non-digital formats, and other types of theses (eg, undergraduate research). CAUL has addressed the value of metadata in ADT by developing agreements for its licensing and commercial re-use. Finally, the ADT Program provides a path for a major contribution to global information infrastructure. This will be achieved through redevelopment of the ADT software to support OAI and metadata harvesting. This paper briefly covers the development and governance of the program to date, expands on some of the key issues and challenges for academic libraries in rethinking their roles based on the ADT Program experience.