7 things to modify, plan, attempt, when I return from DC-2007

Things I’m going to have to follow up as a result of DC-2007 Singapore conference:
(They potentially have implications for services currently provided by and for repositories in Australia.)

Tagging repository items in del.icio.us — a test

After reading Everything is Miscellaneous I asked Peter Sefton if repository items could be tagged to del.icio.us etc and here is his testing out of the idea.

Distilling the common thesis metadata elements

To see the common elements in the 5 thesis metadata schema — ETD_MS, UKETD-DC, XMETADISS, TEF, TDL) — check Thesis-specific metadata across 5 schema (colour coded) (a pdf file )

In sum, the thesis-specific elements all five schema contain are:

Thesis-specific metadata

Part of the SURF report (compare 6.5.1 on p. 47 with 6.2.3.2 on p. 40) recommends using thesis specific metadata schema — not as discrete schema themselves — but as guides to populating a more generic but highly granular metadata datastream.

The thesis specific metadata that we see used in these different schema are:

Recommended Australian digital thesis metadata

Since the ETD-2007 conference I have followed up several discussions with stakeholders in repositories and electronic theses in Asia, Europe and North America attempting to assess best practice for Australian repositories within the international context. Scholars are going to want to know what has been produced globally. The trick has been trying to assess how the balance between national requirements and future proofing for international interoperability can be best achieved.To date I have advised that the best we can do at the moment is to stick with a granular scheme like the MARCXML or MODS until the some clarity begins to emerge from the cloud of different ETD metadata schemas and current harvesting options and various consortia, national and international efforts to impose some order on the various types of theses emerges.

I’ve since read the report conducted by UK’s JISC, the National Library of Sweden and the SURFfoundation in the Netherlands. The report is of a pilot project that attempted to harvest repositories across 5 nations to evaluate issues of interoperability. So the following recommendations are the best I think that can be made for any Australian repository to save itself a lot of hassles in the future regarding the best exposure of their digital theses — they are made with the global picture in mind and with a view to what to reasonably expect in the short term.

Many of these recommendations are from literature cited within the report and not specified directly in the report itself: