TDL will focus on the development of key components of the ETD Repository in its first year. Key deliverables include:

• The ETD Working Group will develop a common state-wide submission system for ETDs, which offers complete control of the ETDs collected by the system, from initial submission through final publication. This will be accomplished by examining member institutions’ current processes and developing and quality testing a usable prototype.
• The Metadata Working Group will have primary responsibilities for developing metadata standards for rights management, preservation, and compound objects, based upon accepted and emerging metadata standards such as MODS, PREMIS, and CopyrightMD, with METS as the base standard for administrative and structural metadata.
• The Computing Infrastructure Working Group will design, develop, and test a state-wide digital preservation system in order to provide long-term stewardship of the repository. This repository will follow the OASIS model, be geographically distributed, redundant, and have advanced functionality enabled by OAI-PMH and rich preservation metadata.
• Establishment of institutional repositories will be accomplished in this year. TDL will also develop a federated repository that maintains university branding at the item level to provide a single access point for all ETDs in the state. Besides these “direct” user interfaces, each institutional repository will be OAI enabled to allow external services to harvest the metadata. These include commercial web search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.), scholarly portals (Google Scholar, Scirus, Current Web Contents, etc.), and reference linking systems (SFX, CrossRef, etc.).