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Open source digital tools
Edited by Bradford Lee Eden [University of Santa Barbara, CA, USA]
Introduction
The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) is the oldest and most prestigious educational institution of Greece in the technological field. The NTUA Central Library, which was founded in 1916, serves the NTUA faculty, staff and students, as well as researchers, scientists and students from other universities. Since July 2007, the NTUA, through its Central Library, offers a new open access Institutional Repository (IR) ([9] NTUA Central Library, 2007a) that contains Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) combined with an e-submission theses service (system, tool) ([10] NTUA Central Library, 2007b). It is based on a DSpace installation, using Dublin Core (DC) descriptive metadata and Open Access Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) for interoperability reasons.
This paper focuses on how the e-submission tool ([10] NTUA Central Library, 2007b) helped NTUA users in submitting their electronic theses, and the IR staff in improving the service workflow and the data integration into the DSpace system. In addition, it emphasizes the added value that the tool gave to the IR service. This can be certified by the continuing evaluation process results. Finally, a conclusion and future thoughts on the e-submission process improvements are presented.
Initiative
The initiative started from the Central Library's vision in self-archiving and open access concept (movement). This vision was shared and accepted officially by the NTUA administration with its Senate's decision (February 24, 2006). This decision establishes the procedure of theses submission in electronic (digital) format and gives the right to the Central Library to collect and deposit the e-theses and the privilege to define the submission procedure specifications. In this context, Central Library has the opportunity to refine the necessary specifications, standards, and procedures for writing, submission, storage, deposit and access of e-theses.
The dilemma
The theses e-submission is an innovative procedure for Greek Universities. NTUA is among the three universities (e.g. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and Aegean University) that apply e-submission for e-theses. The Central Library is officially the NTUA department responsible to organize the procedure and to establish new routines for the academic community regarding e-submission and self-archiving.
The major dilemma that the IR staff faced concerned e-theses submission. There were two options: through DSpace, which...