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Towards Establishing an ETD for Egyptian Universities

ByM. F. Tolba, T. M. Nazmy,

Y.M. Abd El-Latif, E. Abdelwahab

Faculty of computer and information sciences ,Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

2 nd International Conference on Universal Digital Library ICUDL 2006

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AgendaAgenda• Introduction,• The main Components to start an ETD project,• The ETD Project for The Egyptian Universities,• The project objectives,

• ASUNET reserving system,• General Problems in developing an ETD,• The main features of the ETD project,• The ETD Consortium• Conclusions.

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Introduction

• The electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) or Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, movement is truly becoming a global phenomenon,

• According to the UNESCO guide for creating Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) joining and participating in the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, (NDLTD) is one of the best ways to understand the concepts regarding digital libraries.

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Example Architecture (NDLTD)

Humboldt

Duisburg

MIT Filter

MIT

Browse

Union Catalog

Search Recent

User Interface

User Interface

OAI/ODL archive

OAI/ODL protocol

leg

end

Virginia Tech

PhysNet

CalTech

Dresden

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General Problems in developing an ETD

• Readiness: “How ready is the institution to embrace ETDs such that electronic submission should be a requirement of the process?”

• Publication Potential: Several publishers have declared flatly that ETDs are considered previous publications and will not be accepted.

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General Problems in developing an ETD• Intellectual Property: As with any electronic

publication, ETDs present property rights issues, by the student and sponsorship by the university.

• Orientation and Training: Institutions running ETD programs, whether in pilot or routine mode, have discovered that orientation and training need a great deal of attention and may represent significant additional cost.

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General Problems in developing an ETD

• Standards: Choice of formats can be troublesome, especially when students are creating their work in everything from state-of-the-art.

• Costs: Some feel that ETDs, though a tremendous improvement in service, will not result in appreciable overall cost-savings; others feel that considerable savings will result.

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General Problems in developing an ETD

• Archiving, Preservation: Some institutions are moving forward, trusting that technological solutions will be found, while others remain cautious and are not committing to archiving.

• Many others are committed to running parallel paper/microform systems or to relying on UMI as an archival holding.

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Background

• It is well known that UMI has been performing collection, cataloging for access and conversion of dissertations to microform for over twenty years.

• Our center, ASUNET, for deposing the Egyptian universities Dissertations starts at 1992, using microfilm as reserving media.

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The main Components to establish an ETD project

1. Digital objects,2. Funding,3. Infrastructure,4. Policy for submission, publishing, accessibility, following ETD

standards,5. Management6. Creating and joining ETD communities,7. Powerful archiving system,8. Software that includes:

• metadata, to be submitted to a union catalogue, using standard format such as Marc format.,

• harvesting, of metadata using OAI• indexing,• searching, • browsing, • security,• and powerful interfaces.

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Library or consortium

No. of Thesis

Digital thesis

collection only/since

Full-text

PlaceComments

Melvyl catalog2,500,000No/ No InfoYesN. America

Full Text available for subscribers, students and university staff http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/

http://www.cdlib.org/

The Center for Research Libraries

433000Yes/ No

InfoNoN. America

Full texts are available upon request in the Sub-Systems of the respective contributing libraries .

http://www.crl.edu/

Hollis Catalog

-No/ No Info-N. America

There are over 90 libraries at Harvard University with extensive collections in numerous subject

areas. Each library has its own set of policies and procedures and should be consulted for specific

questions and for assistance with research. http://lib.harvard.edu/catalogs/hollis.html

West Virginia University

3000Yes/1997YesN. AmericaRestricted access to subscribed users.http://www.wvu.edu/~thesis/

Tesionline.com10557Yes/2000YesEurope

Commercial Provider. Full texts for paying subscribers only.

http://www.tesionline.com/intl/index.jsp

DATAD (Database of African Thesis and Dissertations)

-No/2000NoAfricahttp://www.aau.org/datad

National Lib. of Wales

15000No/1984NoEuropeWeb Database still being developed

A SURVEY ON SOME ETDs DATABASES

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The ETD Project for The Egyptian Universities

It is Funding from Ministry of higher education (Egypt), ASUNET is in charge of implementing this project.

The National Thesis Library was created to be part of the Ain Shams University Information Network (ASUNET). The intention was to store all theses submitted at Egyptian universities to obtain Masters and Doctoral scientific grades .

the ASUNET is considered as the repository of the theses from all the Egyptian universities, more than 150 faculty in 15 uni.

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The project objectives• The main goals of the proposed project are:

1. Converting ca. 11,000 Microfilm containing more than 150,000 scientific theses into an electronic readable form.

2. Indexing the thus created electronic archive.

3. Building a modern electronic search functionality which enables retrieving information from abstracts as well as full-text documents.

4. Offering both online and offline search functionalities

5. Integrating the created archive with similar databases world-wide

6. Providing accessibility to this repository to a vast audience throughout in the Arab region and throughout the world

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ASUNET reserving system

• ASUNET maintains and preserves their dissertation collection on microfilm and microfiche.

On-demand duplication and distribution in paper and microform.

Since 2000, reformatting into TIFF images wrapped in PDF.

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Receiving the thesesReceiving the theses

Electronic Electronic LibraryLibrary

Backup COPYBackup COPY

The description of the current system at ASUNET

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RATE OF THESES DELIVERED TO ASUNET FROM 1/1/2006 TO 24/8/2006

UNIVERSITYNO. OF THESES

CAIRO2127

AIN SHAMS1360

EL MENOFIA810

SUEZ CANAL500

ALEX410

ASSUIT400

EL MINIA118

TANTA100

EL MANSORA80

SOUTH OF VALLY75

TOTAL5920

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The Egyptian Universities information center

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The existing infrastructure by Ain Shams university

IP range

IP range

34MB

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The available web based databasehttp://net.shams.edu.eg

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The project will implement Fully Web based system, developed by Mansoura uni. and approved by the HSBEU. It use a search tools for all the digital libraries of Egyptian universities, and also international libraries. This program support both MARC21 , and Dublin Core format, and use Z39.50 protocol, a US National Information Standards Organization (NISO) standard that nearly all Library Management System vendors support.

The project software

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The main features of the ETD project

Metadata

• Metadata is usually produced through a process called "cataloging" that is often carried out by trained librarians. Collections of such information are commonly stored in "catalogs". In computerized environments,

• metadata may be automatically or semi-automatically extracted or derived from the original content, or the "full-text" may simply be indexed and searched without involving metadata (as happens on the WWW when search engines are employed).

• The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol is used for Metadata Harvesting

•

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Types of metadata

• Descriptive metadata is information that describes the item, such as title, author, publisher, subject, physical dimensions, et cetera.

• Administrative metadata may include information about acquisition, access restrictions, provenance, preservation, and treatment decisions.

• Structural metadata is information about how the item is put together or arranged such as the table of contents page, individual page numbers, illustration and plates pages, et cetera.

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The document format

• Document type definition (DTD): A DTD provides a standard way to define the SGML or XML tags used within a document.

• Both SGML and XML are "meta" languages because they are used for

defining markup languages.

• Today XML is a W3C Recommendation. This means that XML has been reviewed and approved by the members of the W3C.

• XML is therefore deemed "stable" and ready for widespread deployment.

• XML is a system for designing custom-made markup languages, XML allows users to define a markup language for themselves.

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Migration from print formats to digital formats (ETD System Structure)

RDB

SQL serverPDF XML

convert XML saving(Open xml)

Client

ETD searching-keywords-fulltext

Web/App server(IIS)

Searchengine

-ASP-XPath

XML mapping(XDR Schema)

http

xml/html

XSL XML

XML server

Online

batch

xml

table

DTD / XML Schema

Word

Thesis

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Ontology Design and Deployment

• An ontology is an engineering artifact: – It is constituted by a specific vocabulary used to describe a

certain reality Given key role of ontologies in the Semantic Web,

Design and maintain high quality ontologies, e.g.:• Meaningful — all named classes can have instances• Correct — captured intuitions of domain experts• Minimally redundant — no unintended synonyms

• RDF stands for Resource Description Framework• It is a W3C candidate recommendation (http://www.w3.org/RDF)• RDFS is recognisable as an ontology language

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Our project of an ETD will establish a consortium from all the Egyptian universities, libraries, and cooperate with international ETD communities, to create a collaborative environment to promote interoperability and increase the availability ofavailability of ETDs ETDs in networked digital libraries (Internet).

The ETD Consortium

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The objectives of the The objectives of the ETD Consortium ::

Help each other to build and maintain ETD projects

Share experiences and SW solutions

Find new ways to enhance ETD project.

Create union catalogs of metadata records

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Also help the universities to:

Create and operate a digital library

Be ready for e-publishing of T&Ds

Discuss authors’ rights and define policies to access scholarly information

Model new workflows to process ETDs

Discuss paper & ETDs x ETDs only

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Discuss and define policies for digital preservation

Decide participation in the consortia

Define a local metadata model

Train staff on digital libraries and ETDs

Prepare a program to help students on writing ETDs

Prepare a program to help students on writing ETDs

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Conclusions

• Our conclusions can be viewed as a set of recommendations to apply in the course of physical implementation of the ETD project at ASUNET, such as:

– Creating a professional business plan for the creation of the said ETD including financial, technical and managerial milestones to be met in a realistic time-frame.

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Conclusions– Initiating an inter-disciplinary group concerned with the

issues of E-Copyrights with the aim to solve them to be able to provide accessibility to FULL-Text documents in a legal, organized way.

• Adopting the above described ETDMS standard for metadata-specification and the OAI-PMH Protocol.

• Constructing intelligent search engines and ontologies on top of their usual search algorithms.

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