A workflow model for digital theses and dissertations

Content

A workflow model for digital theses and dissertations

Metadata

Title

A workflow model for digital theses and dissertations

Author
Description

Humboldt University at Berlin was one of the first German universities offering its PhD students to accomplish their duty to publish their theses and dissertations in an electronic way. To date Humboldt's document server is considered a national benchmark concerning technology and publication policy. Documents publicised on the document server satisfy strict quality standards and are mostly stored in an XML format which was generated from the original document source. Combined with the permanently rising quantity of published documents these facts lead to huge administrative expenditures. Starting from the development of document styles and other necessary tools and the permanent support for authors the Computer and Media Service's and University Library's staff has to perform a lot of different tasks for each single publication, e.g. formal check of submitted documents, conversion to XML and HTML, cataloguing and categorising, signing and storing of the different source and target files. In order to manage this branched publication process a workflow model has been developed. It has been realised by several tools including a web based workflow system, a modular and extensible database for document metadata, and a content management system with different applications and interfaces. Beeing aligned to electronic publication of theses and dissertations the workflow system and its appendant implementation can be adapted to other publication types such as scientifc journals and conference proceedings. The talk will also go into implications to the workflow in case documents contain multi media elements.

Date

2003