Representatives of the Texas Digital Library attended the 13th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2010) this week. The conference took place in Austin, Texas, on June 16-18.
TDL Chief Technology Officer Peter Nürnberg presented on Vireo deployment experiences on Thursday, June 17, in a break-out session devoted to Vireo, the ETD submission and management software developed by the TDL. Also speaking in the session was Laura Hammons, Thesis Office director at Texas A&M University, the first institution to deploy Vireo in a live environment. The final presenters were Sarah Shreeves and Mark Zulauf from the University of Illinois, which went live with Vireo in October 2009 after pilot test in the spring; UI is making ETD submission through Vireo mandatory in the fall 2010 semester. John Hagen, the coordinator of the ETD Program at West Virginia University, moderated the session.
Nürnberg spoke about efforts over the last year to “productize” Vireo, or prepare it for deployment as open source software, an action that will be taken in September 2010. Hammons’ presentation detailed the transition of Texas A&M from a legacy ETD system to Vireo. Similarly, Shreeves and Zulauf shared their experiences developing an ETD program at the University of Illinois, as well as their efforts in working with the Texas Digital Library to obtain the Vireo code and in modifying the code to suit UI’s needs.
ETD 2010 is organized by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and is hosted by the University of Texas at Austin Libraries. Presentations from the conference will be available on the conference website.