1. EThOS A National OAI and Digitisation Service for e-theses in the United Kingdom Chris Awre EThOSnet Web Services Day June 2009

2. What is EThOS? EThOS feasibility study, 2005-6 o JISC project to develop a pilot OAI service provider for e-theses o Also tasked with developing a financially viable and sustainable business model EThOSnet project, 2007-9 o JISC project to develop a live service British Library EThOS service o Live since 20 th January 2009 o Six-fold increase in demand

3. EThOS Toolkit Dual role o Advocate e-theses and how to implement the necessary procedures and technology o Establish a common process that allows an OAI service provider to work over the many varied institutional repositories providing e-theses Information provided by EThOS… o …but also sought from the community http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/

4. EThOS hub Based on a customised version of EPrints 2 for storing the e-theses Using the ARC harvester The user interface is derived from BLDirect Bespoke development for admin interface Bespoke prototype development of web service submission tool Re-use and modification of existing software saved considerable time and money

5. Technical architecture

6. Aggregate and deliver

7. Technical futures Compound e-theses o EThOS can deal with multiple files, but not when packaged OAI-ORE may assist here SWAP not that helpful Identifiers o Key to persisting relationships across repositories o Current identifiers are unique, but not de- referenceable This will change when EThOS metadata becomes harvestable

8. Web Services Web Services encompasses many different potential technologies o No fixed agreement on their scope o OAI often considered a web service Focus of this workshop is primarily on SOAP and REST-based Web Services o Current interest – a technology fashion? o Recognising there is a spectrum of uses for these But also… o Why Web Services? o Sharing experiences of use

9. Web Services & repositories In context, can repositories benefit from using Web Services? o For their own immediate purposes e.g., deposit o For their interaction with other systems o For federated repository services Existing EThOS architecture does not make use of Web Service technologies o Deposit tool prototype not developed further Today is informing EThOS, but hopefully of benefit to repository development generally

10. Thank you Chris Awre o c.awre@hull.ac.uk c.awre@hull.ac.uk Kevin OLeary o kevin.oleary@imperial.ac.uk kevin.oleary@imperial.ac.uk EThOS o http://ethos.bl.uk http://ethos.bl.uk o ethos-help@bl.uk ethos-help@bl.uk o http://www.ethos.ac.uk http://www.ethos.ac.uk