| dc.description.abstract | The Texas Digital Library is a consortium of universities organized to provide a single digital
infrastructure for the scholarly activities of Texas universities. The four current Association of
Research Libraries (ARL) universities and their systems comprise more than 40 campuses, 375,000
students, 30,000 faculty, and 100,000 staff; while non-ARL institutions represent another sizable
addition in both students and faculty1. TDL’s principal collection is currently its federated collection
of ETDs from three of the major institutions; The University of Texas, Texas A&M University, and
Texas Tech University. Since the ARL institutions in Texas alone produce over 4,000 ETDs per
year, the growth potential for a single state-wide repository is significant.
To facilitate the creation of this federated collection, the schools agreed upon a common
metadata standard represented by a MODS XML schema2. Although this creates a baseline for
metadata consistency, there exists ambiguity within the interpretation of the schema that creates
usability and interoperability challenges. Name resolution issues are not addressed by the schema,
and certain descriptive metadata elements need consistency in format and level of significance so
that common repository functionality will operate intuitively across the collection.
It was determined that a common ingestion point for ETDs was needed to collect metadata in a
consistent, authoritative manner. A working group was formed that consisted of representatives from
five universities, and a state-wide survey of the state of ETDs was conducted, with varied levels of
engagement with ETDs reported. Many issues were identified, including policy questions such as
open access publishing, copyright considerations and the collection of release authorizations, the
role of infrastructure development such as a Shibboleth federation for authentication, and
interoperability with third-party publishers such as UMI. ETD workflows at six schools were
analyzed, and a meta-workflow was identified with three stages: ingest, verification, and
publication. It was decided that Shibboleth would be used for authentication and identity
management within the application.
This paper reports on the results of the survey, and describes the system and submission
workflow that was developed as a consequence. A functional prototype of the ingest stage has been
built, and a full prototype with Shibboleth integration is slated for completion in May of 2007.
Demonstrators of the application are expected to be deployed in fall of 2007 at three schools. | en |
