Electronic Theses and Dissertations Policy Manual

This is a policy manual outlining the history and proceedures of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) Project at the University of Notre Dame. The manual is divided into the following sections:

About the Project
Computer infrastructure
Roles and responsibilities of the Graduate School
Roles and responsibilities of the University Libraries

About the Project

The goal of the Project is to systematically collect and disseminate electronic theses and dissertations created by graduate students of the University, and it is a direct implementation of the ETD Project initially developed by Virginia Tech. While paper versions of theses and dissertations are still an option for collection, dissemination, and archival purposes, electronic versions of theses and dissertations provide the means for wider accessibility and dissemination. Using a system such as this one, it is possible to implement search mechanisms against the full texts of each item in the collection. Additionally, it is possible to create a nationwide (and worldwide) network of theses and dissertations exposing the content of this very important primaray literature. For more information about these national/worldwide efforts see the home page of the Networked Digital Library Of Theses And Dissertations:

http://www.ndltd.org/

The enhanced accessibility of electronic theses and dissertations comes a cost, namely in the form of policy decisions, additional workflows, computer technology, as well as data archiving and migration proceedures. This manual is the beginings of a document addressing these issues.

Computer infrastructure

In computer terms, the ETD Project is a database application with a Web front-end. The software was written by Virginia Tech using MySQL as the database back-end and Perl as the common gateway interface (CGI) between the end-user and the data -- the documents and their meta data.

The ETD software does not require very much computer horsepower. Just about any Unix/Linux computer will do. Presently our implementation resides on a computer with a 1 GHz Intel-based microprocessor, 512 MB of RAM, 18 GB of hard disk space, a tape drive, all running under RedHat Linux version 7.1. It is beyond the scope of this document to describe how to install these aspects of the system's infrastructure, but the following paragraphs describe how the Virginia Tech software was installed.

The ETD Project used here is an implementation of the software written by Virginia Tech, and it is described at the following URL:

http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ETD-db/developer/

Instructions for installing the system are outlined at the URL above, but the instructions make a number of assumptions about how the system is to be installed and some of the installation proceedures did not seem to work correctly. Consequently, there are number of thing different in our implementation:

The system has been installed under the /usr/local/etd file system, and not etd-db as described in the documentation. In retrospect, this change on our part seems rather arbitrary, and it did make things a bit more complicated later on.
The MySQL usernames allowed to write to the database are: etd_submitted, etd_available, etd_withheld, etd_maint, and etd_public. The passwords associated with these usernames are on record in the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department of the University Libraries.
Lines 68-70 of the Perl program create_everything.pl had to be commented out since MySQL does not return "created" after creating databases.
The usernames for CGI access control are: etd-admin, etd-grad, and etd-catlog. The passwords for these usernames are on record in the Department.
Step #3 under the section Configure Your Web Server of the instructions is really done as a parta of Step #1 of Configure Your Web Server.
Don't forget to restart the HTTP server have making configuration changes.
It is very important to read the document Customize The Scripts For Your Site, since the system will not work correctly if you don't. Nothing unusual was done in this aspect of the customization process.
By default, all of the CGI scripts point to Perl in /usr/local/bin/perl. Unfortunately, Perl is saved in /usr/local/bin on our computer. Consquently, a massive find/replace routine was run against the CGI scripts to point to the real location of Perl.
Since was changed to /usr/local/etd (see above), the scripts did not work correctly. Another find/replace routine had to be run against all the scripts to change etd-db to simply etd.
One one place was found where the scripts don't seem to work correctly. Specifically, that place is the viewing of PDF documents before they are approved.
Total installation time, including a bit of testing, took about three (3) hours.

After installation and customization, the various aspects of the system are available at the following URLs:

Author (student) and public interface - http://dewey.library.nd.edu/etd/
Staff pages for managing the system - http://dewey.library.nd.edu/etd/staff/

In the future it might be better to create an aliased host named etd.library.nd.edu or etd.nd.edu in order to make the process of remembering the host's name easier.

Roles and responsibilities of the Graduate School

(Insert here the sorts of things the graduate school will do. It should probably enumerate who is going to do the work, how the work gets done, and what the format of electronic theses and dissertations will take.)

Roles and responsibilities of the University Libraries

The roles and responsibilities of the University Libraries can be divided into three parts:

maintaining the computer infrastructure
cataloging approved theses and dissertations
archiving and migrating the system's data

Each of these parts are described below.

Maintaining the computer infrastructure

The Libraries will maintain the computer infrastructure. This means housing the computer hardware, installing the system's software, configuring the scripts, backing up the data, and providing technical support when things break. The hardware and software maintenance will be done by the Digital Access and Information Architecture Department where regular backups are already being done. Problems with the functionality should be sent to the Department as a whole (daiad@dewey.library.nd.edu), or directed to Eric Lease Morgan (631-8604).

Cataloging approved theses and dissertations

On a regular basis a designated individual in the Cataloging Department will check for the existence of new electronic theses and dissertations to be cataloged. When any are identified, the appropriate personnel will be informed of the titles needing cataloging. The item will then be cataloged following current local and national practices for Notre Dame print theses and electronic resources, including the addition of the item's URL in order to provide direct access from the catalog record to the electronic version of the thesis. Once cataloging is complete, the individual responsible for the record will mark it as cataloged in the ETD system in order to add it to the publicly accessible database.

Preserving and migrating the system's data

Preserving and migrating the system's data has got to be one of the most important and challenging aspects of this project because it embodies the greatest number of unknown elements; preserving the data making up the system must go beyond mere system backups.

The Digital Access and Information Architecture Department will regularly copy the system's data. This process will include regularly saving to tape or CDROM the underlying database's content into standard query language (SQL) files -- a plain text files format used by all relational database applications. This data contains the meta data describing each item in the collection. This data includes things like title, abstract, keywords, author, and advisors. It also includs the URN -- Universal Resource Number -- used to link the meta data to the directory where the ETD are saved.

Similarly, the entire collection of ETD will be saved to tape or CDROM for preservation purposes. In the early stages of the Project small number of ETDs will be saved to tape or CDROM. As the Project matures and more ETD become available, a greater number of ETDs will be saved to individual tapes or preservation purposes. Each tape or CDROM will include copies of the ETDs, the metadata from underlying database and a plain text file at the root of each tape or CDROM describing the item's contents.

For redundancy purposes, we advocate the University continue to print theses and dissertations. The files of the ETD Project are Portable Document Format (PDF) files, an industry standard articulated by a company named Adobe. File formats change very quickly, and we hope PDF will be a supported format in the future and/or will easily be able to be converted into other formats when they present themselves. The key to being able to do this convertion is having the data now. That is why efforts are being made to archive this imporant literature.

Date created: 2002-06-10
Date updated: 2002-06-10
URL: http://www.library.nd.edu/daiad/etd-policy/