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The purpose of this paper is to give technical information about the application of ABCD open source software for managing institutional repository of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) at various levels with illustrations.

Practical method and programming in the ABCD software for building ETD repository and its management

ABCD software is an excellent tool for creating institutional repository (IR) and manages it at various levels and to create ETD portal.

The paper describes using ABCD software how one can create database of ETDs, how to submit ETDs in full text or abstract, how to search, how to implement it in open archive environment and simplicity of making union catalogue of ETD repositories on one platform of ABCD portal.

The process of ETD management and IR building using ABCD open source software will be useful to all the new institutions, colleges, universities, national libraries, international organizations who want to initiate the process of building ETD repository.

The development team of ABCD software is still in process of releasing 2.0 versions and to develop tool for IR and ETD management. In this paper attempt has been made to describe with illustrations that how the software is making progress towards ETD management or building IR. One of the author is main project leader of ABCD open source software.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the performance of electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) initiatives in the repositories of federal government-owned universities due to the poor global visibility of ETDs from Nigeria.

An explanatory case study empirical research method was adopted for the study. Using an adapted methodology of Ghosh (2009) and multiple data gathering techniques, data was collected based on the three domains of the network of excellence on digital libraries (DELOS) digital library reference model.

The ETD initiatives in repositories of Nigerian federal universities have not made remarkable progress as digital libraries based on policy, content and system architecture. The specificity of ETDs is not clearly stated in the policies where available. The repositories housing the ETDs are also not compliant with the open archive initiative-protocol for metadata harvesting framework.

The study focussed on ETD initiatives in federal government-owned universities. Although the findings of the study are relevant to other institutions in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. It cannot be used as a basis for the generalisation based on other performance metrics.

This research study concluded that electronic theses and dissertations in Nigerian institutional repositories are not well managed for effective service delivery and long-term accessibility. The ill-management of the ETD initiatives is the reason for the poor global visibility and accessibility of these research output from this part of Africa.

The study assessed ETD initiatives using constructs from a theoretical framework.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Electronic Theses and Dissertations program implemented and managed by the Indiana State University since 2009. The paper illustrates issues relating to the background, policies, platform, workflow and cataloging, as well as the publication and preservation of graduate scholarship.

The authors examined many aspects of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations program and addressed issues dealt before, during and after the publication of the electronic theses and dissertations collection. The approaches the authors utilized are literature review and personal management experience from working on the program.

Implementing an Electronic Theses and Dissertations program involves providing a series of management services. These services include developing relevant policies, implementing an archiving and publication platform and creating submission and publishing workflows, as well as cataloging, disseminating and preserving the student collection. Openly publishing the collection through a range of access points significantly increases its visibility and accessibility. Adopting several archival and preservation strategies ensures the long-term readiness of the collection.

This paper will provide useful practices for implementing an ETD program to those institutions new to the ETD initiative process. It also contributes to the current body of literature and to the overall improvement of ETD programs globally.

The paper aims to describe recent moves to establish a UK electronic thesis service. The existing arrangements for access to UK doctoral theses are not seen as ideal or sustainable. A range of stakeholders have come together in recent years to invest in an alternative. The resulting service model is one that is relevant to higher education across the UK and beyond.

The EThOS service model is a partnership between the British Library as the service provider and UK universities, and includes technical, legal, business and operational aspects. It has been achieved by a series of development projects undertaken since 2002, culminating now in the impending transition from prototype to live service.

The EThOS service model includes a range of partnership options to suit the varied requirements of UK higher education institutions. The main ambition of the model is to make electronic theses available open access via a financially viable and sustainable model. The core of the model is a “central hub”, offering discovery, digitisation and preservation functions, working with institutions, in part via their institutional repositories.

It is hoped that most UK higher education institutions will sign up for EThOS and benefit from this shift to both electronic theses and open access. Many have already indicated that they will do so.

The value of the EThOS service is likely to be considerable. Where theses are available open access, their use escalates. EThOS will enable UK theses to be more widely accessed, read, used and cited worldwide. Authors, institutions and the UK all benefit from this.

This paper aims to offer a comprehensive description and analysis of electronic reserve services in academic libraries in China. It also seeks to describe possible solutions for libraries to build multi‐functional e‐reserve services in order to face the challenge of the vast expansion in both academia and the economy in modern China.

The paper reviews the recent literature on the practices of e‐reserve services, and analyses the results of the online surveys conducted in the 112 key university libraries in the China 211 Project, especially the top 15 university libraries.

The paper reveals that three‐level (national, regional, and campus‐wide) e‐reserve resource systems have been developed jointly or individually by Chinese academic libraries. Their development, implementation and implications are discussed; existing problems and possible solutions are identified.

The paper provides insights into the recent development of e‐reserving services in Chinese academic libraries, offers useful information about e‐reserving resources for students and faculty, and recommends solutions to libraries for e‐reserve services.

Implementing and maintaining Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) program at a national level encounters numerous difficulties in particular from technical, legal, business, and financial perspective. Business model (BM) is a tool to help to address business-driven challenges, such as business feasibility and viability, as one of the important aspects. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the BM practiced by different national Electronic Theses and Dissertations (NETDs) cases.

BM of seven NETDs programs have been studied through an online questionnaire; besides, programs’ websites were observed and related documents were examined. Business model canvas (BMC) was used to describe the business rationale behind the selected cases.

Most of the NETDs programs lack a documented BM. The main value of these programs is sharing ETDs which is offered to academics through online channels; skillful staff and proper hardware/software are their main resources to do so. Furthermore, their key activities are developing hardware/software and negotiating with ETDs owners as their key partners. All these activities required huge cost which is generally covered by public funding.

This study pioneers in applying BM concept into field of NETDs. Therefore, the major contribution of this study is to provide an analysis of NETDs programs’ BM through BMC. Furthermore, the paper provides recommendations on how ETDs could be implemented in a cost effective, sustainable, and viable way.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the status of eight interoperability protocols within repositories of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) as an introduction to further studies on feasibility of deploying these protocols in upcoming areas of interoperability.

Three surveys of 266 ETD repositories, 15 common ETD management software solutions, and 136 ETD experts were conducted in order to appraise the protocols. These protocols were evaluated in four categories of aggregation, syndication, distributed search, and publishing protocols.

This study revealed that, despite its drawbacks, Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) is still the most utilized interoperability protocol within ETD providers, ETD software developers, and implementers, followed by ATOM and Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE) protocols. However, in all competitive areas related to performance and functionality, ORE surpasses other protocols. It was also found that the three protocols of ATOM, PMH, and ORE could be used interchangeably in the most used cases of interoperability protocols in repositories.

In this research, a combination of methods was employed to evaluate the status of protocols, from the perspectives of data providers, software providers, and implementers. Practitioners may use these methods to assess other protocols in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

The conduct of this study has involved three types of surveys, through which different aspects of interoperability protocols are evaluated. Prior to the conduct of this study, there has yet any study focusing on the same topic, which has adopted the multi‐method that has been adopted in this study.