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From the website:

“The ADT program is designed to improve access to, and enhance transfer of, the research information contained in theses by providing a full text version available from the desktop via the web. The retrieval is enhanced by the inclusion of metadata tags in the documents which are given a higher weighting by the more sophisticated search engines.
It is also designed to provide a new model for deposit and archiving of theses that takes into account the tools and technologies that students are now using to prepare their theses.
The program has two major components, digitisation of theses as part of the deposit process and the digitisation of a selected number of frequently requested existing theses. As each University is responsible for maintaining an archival copy of the theses of their own institution, each participant in the program will mount their own theses on a server located in their respective institution. The participants will use the same database configuration, standards and metadata system to ensure compatibility. The document format will be Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) ensuring that the data is independent of the platform on which it is created. Adobe PDF ensures that a high quality printed version can be provided if needed. Acrobat is relatively easy to use, with a high quality free reader readily available. PDF has also become an electronic publishing standard.”

The ADT Program is a significant success. The majority of Australian universities are signed up and deliver thesis metadata to the ADT Program gateway at the University of New South Wales, while in late 2005 New Zealand also agreed inter-nationally to feed theses to the Program, making it the Australasian Digital Theses Program. A new website is in beta testing, and the gateway will shortly allow OAI-PMH harvesting, which it has not previously. The gateway (holding e-thesis metadata) is harvested by Google, Google Scholar, etc. Unfortunately most of the leaf repositories collect only a fraction of theses produced annually. This may change in the next few years, and we will try to keep the current state of policies up to date.

Most of the ADT Program leaf repositories in the universities are rather primitive (having started some time ago) and are not open to Internet harvesting or browsing. This situation will probably change quite rapidly. The University of Tasmania wrote software which allowed theses to be harvested from its main EPrints repository, and the University of Melbourne has also been using this software for close to a year. As a consequence both universities have e-theses represented on the ARROW gateway as well as Google Scholar, etc.

It makes no sense to have e-theses (or ETDs) stored in a separate repository with the concomitant costs of extra software maintenance and training for different interfaces. Any university starting a repository now must choose to go with an integrated repository. To their credit, both the ADT Program and ARROW recognize this.

On 28–30 September 2005, the 8th International Symposium on Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETD2005) was held at UNSW, Sydney, Australia. The full text of the papers is held for the time being at http://adt.caul.edu.au/etd2005/program.html.


Page last modified on 29 October 2008, at 08:42 AM Tasmanian Time