The Digital Dissertations and Theses in the Russian State Library

Abstract

The report describes the digital library of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) supported by the Russian Fundation for Basic Research and developed by the RSL. The digital library of ETDs contains: (1) the OPAC functioning now in the RSL, (2) tables of contents, (3) full text data base of theses and dissertations, (4) bibliographic citations, (5) authority data representing names of authors (personal names). This digital library should be one of digital collections in the RSL Digital Library named OREL (Open Russian Electronic Library). The main result is that the Library begins to take dissertations and theses in electronic form from authors graduated by home academic (dissertation) councils and who wish to give their works for digital library of RSL. The Library makes an agreement with each author by which an open access to dissertation and/or thesis text is provided through the RSL Web-site in Internet or Library intranet. Thus the Online Dissertations Digital Library was opened in June, 2002 and received an official status. The report describes an organizational work in RSL and out of it; the technology of graduated authors files processing; the cataloguing process; the software for the DDL development towards XML structure; metadata structure; the search means in the data base. It would be made an attempt to compare the project of RSL with the similar foreign experience.