A new French circuit for the electronic theses
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A new French circuit for the electronic theses
Libraries of higher education institutions in charge of granting theses have to catalog theses, make them available for research and preserve them. Technological changes, especially electronic production of theses gives way to a new situation. The French law organises a flexible system for the 11.000 theses granted each year and bind some rules in order to preserve a minimal cohesion all over the country. Each university defines the theses style sheet and formats used for diffusion. However, as far as preservation is concerned, the documents must be in XML or PDF formats, the documents have to be in XML or PDF, and the metadata joined must comply with TEF recommendations (Thèses Electroniques Françaises), a recommendation on French Electronic Theses. ABES (Agence Bibliographique de l'Enseignement Supérieur) is currently implementing a system called STAR. STAR's main features are : * 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.
2008