ETD 2008 Road Trip: Fettercairn Distillery

ETD 2008 Road Trip: Crathes Castle and Gardens

Closing Session: Future Plans

Besides the the promotion for ETD 2009 in Pittsburgh, the remaining conference delegates were taking theorugh successive ballots to assist in the determination of themes, tracks, and places for future ETD meetings.

Innovation Track: the ABES STAR system

Marianne Giloux and Isabelle Mauger Perez from the Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur (ABES), France presented the plan for the implementation of STAR, which includes:

• saving and recording the Theses
• gathering and extracting metadata used for description, indexation, long term preservation and dissemination
• transfering the theses to a national system of preservation
• allocating a permanent identifier ( URL)

Data and metadata are ingested in STAR either on-line, through Web forms, or by importation of normalized files extracted from various locals systems, or with a mixed method.

Innovation Track: Open Electronic Library of Kyrgyzstan

Sania Battalova, from the American University of Central Asia, Kyrgyz Republic and President of Library and Information Consortium of Kyrgyzstan, reportedabout the Open Digital Libraries of Papers of Kyrgyzstan scientists, implementing a cooperative across 12 libraries in Kyrgyzstan. The Library community implementing new technologies and projects, and building team work for sustainability.

The Innovation Track: Peru

Libio Huaroto from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos Library System in Lima, Peru, has already provides an earlier blog update on the developments of his ETD efforts in Peru. At ETD2008, he spoke about the implementation of the Digital Thesis Peruvian Network. Libio also set up a slideshare site to share presentations.

Friday: the UK EthOS Project!

The UK’s Electronic Thesis On-line Service (EThOS) team presented a live demonstration and discussion of the next-generation EthOS system and the harvesting technologies they will use for thesis metadata held in the servers and on the shelves of up to 120 UK university libraries to be accessed from a single point of contact. The EThOS partners highlighted why this service is important to UK research and how it benefits UK Higher Education and those who want access to a primary research resource.

ETD Leadership Award: Susan Copeland

John Hagan presented ETD 2008 co-chair Dr. Susan Copeland with the 2008 ETD Leadership Award. Dr. Copeland is largely responsible for ETD developments in the United Kingdom and she has influenced activities in this area in Europe. She has also worked extensively on international projects with the NDLTD and the American Library Association.

ETD Student Awards

The NDLTD ETD Awards for 2008 were already announced, yet warmly celebrated with the student thesis authors. One of the highlights was the presentation by Nursing thesis author Colin Macduff, who as part of his presentation re-enacted the "non-digital birth" of the print thesis, in order to make the point that his digital thesis deserved better neonatal care.

Thursday Evening Conference Dinner

The ETD 2008 conference delegates traveled by charter bus to the Ardoe House Hotel for a wonderful traditional Scottish formal dinner, followed by special entertainment: A Celtic musician trio performing Scottish country dance standards. They also insisted on audience participation, which resulted in the inevitable collision of cultures when the direction "inside foot, then outside foot" cannot be translated into left or right!

Plenary Session: Open Sesame!

John Hagan provided an overview of the longitudinal evidence he has gathered over the decade-long e-volution of the West Virginia U. ETD Repository program and it morphed into the institutional repository framework. The successful WVU program (yes, the graphic at left demonstrates the formula for that famous 146,000% figure you hear rumored at ETD meetings) still faces challenges to persuade faculty in the humanities that open access of creative theses is a winning proposition for students.

Poster Session!

Dr. Shalini Urs from the U. of Mysore in India presented a poster on an experiement to create an ontology based retrieval system for ETDs in the Vidyanidhi Digital Library.

Poster Session!

Antanas Streimikis from the Kaunas U. of Technology in Lithuania presented a poster session describing the Lithuanian eLABa ETD collection, its regulations, documentation, and software applications.

Poster Session!

Jane Aucock from the U. of St. Andrews and the Scottish Digital Libraries Consortium explains how her university developed and implemented their ETD deposit program.

Thursday Plenary I- The SPECTRa-T Project

Peter Morgan from Cambridge University presented the initial results of the SPECTRa-T project, using a text mining tool for extracting chemical terminology and object identification from both PDF and non-PDF files. Peter stressed that this project met its goal of establishing a proof of concept approach, prior to the actual establishment of a production model.

Thursday Keynote: Herbert Van de Sompel

Dr. Herbert Van de Sompel, from the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, presented a fascinating and engaging introduction to two projects he is currently engaged in as a member of the Digital Library Research and Prototying Team at his institution: OAI-ORE, which focuses on digital object re-use and exchange, and MESUR, a demonstration project to establish a new scholarly metric based on usage, not publication. At left is Dr. Van de Sompel's explanation of aggregated object clusters and the need to address object grouping and similarity, beyond individual documents or web pages.

Libio arrives from Peru!

Libio Huaroto, delegate from the La Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos Library System, has arrived at ETD2008 on Thursday morning. Welcome, Libio!

Entertainment at the Beach Ballroom

Entertainment at the Beach Ballroom Civic Reception was provided by the City of Roses Chorus of Sweet Adelines, a female chorus which performs in shows in Aberdeen and throughout the country.

City of Aberdeen Welcomes ETD 2008

The Aberdeen Beach Ballroom was the site of the Aberdeen Civic Reception to welcome the delegates to ETD 2008. The delegates queued up up outside and enjoyed the pleasant weather and views of the sea.

Ana Pavani's Plenary Session focused on making ETDs accessible to the visually impaired and blind. She drew on the work of Cátedra UNESCO de Leitura PUC-Rio a UNESCO project devoted to reading activites that suggested that the ETD global library could be enhanced to be used by those with other than normal vision. Ana began her talk by giving credit to James Clark Maxwell(1831-1879), the Scottish scientist and inspiration for their institutional repository system.