Lawrence Webley, Hussein Suleman, Tatenda Chipeperekwa University of Cape Town Department of Computer Science Digital Libraries Laboratory

 Present  History  Requirements  ETD Environment in SA  Design Principles  System Architecture  Screen Snaps  Future work

Establishment of NDLTD Mid-1990s Early South African ETD sites at Rhodes/Wits/Pretoria Late-1990s OAI-PMH developed to interconnect repositories 2001 SA National working group formed 2007 First hosted collections at NRF 2009 First Version of Portal + Repository 2010 ETD 2011 in Cape Town! 2011

 To link South Africa into international efforts  To gather data on university output  To deal with specific local issues  To showcase local accomplishments locally and internationally  To promote local universities  To motivate institutions to have active ETD projects

 Metadata only  Metadata standards  What to expose – Masters/PhD only?  Who will provide support?  What about small institutions?  How to provide access? – OAI-PMH

 Create reusable, customisable, open source ETD portal management software ◦ Preferable not to reinvent the wheel! ◦ Composed entirely of open source components ◦ Can be customised to meet other use cases  Scalability ◦ National archives are constantly growing

Institution NRF Institution NRF... Institution X Institution Y... NRF Central Archive TD Archive NRF ETD Portal NDLTD Union Archive SCIRUS... SA NRF SA Universities and Technicons International Partners

 ETD collections at approximately 12 institutions ◦ Mostly larger, research intensive institutions  Various software packages in use ◦ Eprints, Dspace, ETD-db, other  OAI-PMH support in all systems

 ETD Collections hosted remotely at the NRF  For smaller institutions with few resources and few ETDs  Multiple instances of Dspace  Temporary arrangement  Technical support from NRF – collection management from institutions

 Our repository software fits in here  Collection of metadata records from all institutions  Any/all metadata formats  Harvested from institutions using OAI-PMH  Provides OAI-PMH and RSS interfaces  No digital objects

 Web interface to collection  Search/Browse/View metadata  Statistics for collections  Latest entries  Administrative interface ◦ For managing source repositories

 NDLTD Union Archive ◦ International Collection  SCIRUS ◦ Science specific search engine

 All modern Linux-based software components  Multi-tiered, simple architecture of complex components  Clean separation between components ◦ Scalability ◦ More easily customised (simply replace a component) ◦ Failure resistant  Any metadata  Simplicity (minimal dependencies)  Java/Tomcat/Lucene

Database Harvester Harvester Web Interface RSS Feed OAI-PMH data provider portal Higher up repositories portal Institutions portal Summary Info portal

 Retrieves metadata from a set of ETD repositories ◦ Via OAI-PMH interfaces  Performs incremental harvests  Performs record validation ◦ Simple validation checks  Performs twice daily harvests  Configurable via web frontend.

 Provides machine access points to metadata harvested ◦ OAI-PMH interface  Can use any SQL-compliant DB ◦ Our implementation used MySQL  Additional services provided ◦ RSS feed of latest records ◦ Summary statistics for records from each institution  Designed to fit into a hierarchy of OAI-PMH compliant DLs

Portal Web Interface Search, browse statistics Lucene Portal Database Harvester repository RSS Harvester Web Admin

 Harvests from Repository into portal DB  Lucene indexes records  Portal provides human interface ◦ Allows keyword searching, browsing, category searches ◦ Also offers links to OAI-PMH and RSS interfaces

 Packaging into Ubuntu repository  Generic browsing categories  Content Management System ◦ Favourites, citation  Social media buttons ◦ Facebook like, google plus  Bug fixes

Questions? Links Live Source Code