Towards Universal Accessibility of ETDs: Building the NDLTD Union Archive
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Towards Universal Accessibility of ETDs: Building the NDLTD Union Archive
By virtue of its name, NDLTD (Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations) suggests to newcomers the existence of a collection of accessible ETDs. While many current members do indeed have such collections at the level of institutions or consortia, there is no single mechanism to aggregate all ETDs to provide NDLTD-wide services (e.g., searching). Past attempts have focussed on federated searching and have achieved a small measure of success. However, current trends in digital library architecture suggest that metadata harvesting is a simpler and more robust solution. This approach is actively advocated by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which recently devised a protocol to support such a mode of interoperability. The Union Archive project is an attempt to implement and build upon the work of the OAI by setting up and maintaining a central metadata collection, fed by OAI-compliant remote sites. NDLTD members are encouraged to contribute from their host sites to this archive by supporting the OAI protocol, with particular conventions that are specific to ETDs. A preliminary analysis of the operation of the Union Archive both supports the interoperability approach of the OAI and paves the way for a larger-scale project within the community of ETD archives.
2002