| dc.description.abstract | As a consortium of libraries from public and private institutions across the state of Texas, the
Texas Digital Library (TDL) exists to promote the scholarly activities of its members. One of its
earliest initiatives was a federated collection of ETDs from across the state. There are currently
16 participating schools in TDL, four of which are contributing over 4000 ETDs per year, and
membership and contributions are growing. A diverse set of content contributors introduces
the problems of inconsistent metadata and incompatible storage and access methods, making it
difficult to offer effective tools and services. This influenced the decision to create a state-wide
system for managing the entire life-cycle of ETDs, from the point of ingestion to final
publication; pooling resources to address this common problem was appealing for both
technical and economic reasons.
In 2007, we reported on the status of the functional system prototype. This paper reports on the
results of the demonstrator event that is taking place in spring 2008 at Texas A&M University
and the University of Texas, and discusses the requirements for moving to a production
environment. These include testing and scaling the system to handle the large numbers of users
dispersed over a significant geographic area (Texas is the third-largest producer of PhDs in the
US). Our intention is to embrace international standards for ETD metadata and policies as they
continue to evolve through community efforts, such as the NDLTD union catalog of ETDs.
Finally, we will examine the status of the project’s release as an add-on component to a DSpace
repository through the Manakin interface framework under an open source license. A primary
design goal of this project is to create a product that satisfies TDL’s requirements and provides
a turnkey implementation for ETD management and publication that can be scaled for the
broader academic community. | en |
