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Design

Project Design and Timeline

The Texas ETD Repository goals are to:

  1. Develop policies for ETD submission, licensing, access, and preservation.
  2. Develop standards for structural, descriptive, rights management, and preservation metadata using METS.
  3. Develop a state-wide common ETD submission system with organic METS support.
  4. Develop multi-faceted repository discovery services.
  5. Develop a robust digital preservation system.
  6. Deploy the system for the members of the Texas Digital Library and recruit other graduate institutions in the state to participate.
  7. Sustain and evaluate the Texas ETD Repository.

Year 1 (2007-2008): Planning and Development

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.).

Year 2 (2008-2009): Deployment

In the second year, TDL will deploy the submission, discovery, and preservation systems developed in Year 1. This phase will require a high degree of coordination among the TDL members.

  • The common ETD submission system will be implemented on a demonstrative basis for Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and The University of Texas at Austin. After obtaining feedback and testing the system, the submission system will be ready for statewide deployment at the beginning of Year 3. TDL will provide technical support, orientation, and training to each campus.
  • The federated repository will be implemented by the TDL to provide one point of access for all of its members’ institutional repositories.
  • The preservation network will be implemented. Preservation storage nodes will be installed on the TDL members’ campuses and the institutional repositories will be configured to communicate with the preservation system.
  • Following deployment among current TDL members, further graduate degree institutions in the state will be encouraged to participate. Although the current members of the TDL account for 73% of Ph.D.s in the state, coverage will be increased by broadening participation in the Texas ETD Repository to include other graduate degree granting institutions in the state.

Year 3 (2009-2010): Sustain and Evaluate

After initial deployment, TDL will enter the maintenance period for the repository during which each campus will use the system for ongoing ETD management. The working groups will continue to address emerging maintenance issues to ensure that the system is satisfying its functional requirements. TDL will evaluate the Texas ETD Repository using multiple methods: user studies, usage statistics, and repository certification. User studies will assess service quality through surveys of faculty, students, and repository users. Usage statistics, based on server log analysis, will be employed to evaluate user access of the repository. This analysis can contribute to an understanding of how the various discovery services lead users to the content in the repository. TDL will also develop a certification process that defines the minimum qualities and services to be provided by TDL members regarding ETDs.