Improving the ETD submission process through automated author self contribution using DSpace

1. ABSTRACT We are developing support for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) as the first step in supporting electronic scholarly publishing in general. In this paper we discuss the planning and initial implementation processes undertaken at UNC as part of our migration from print to electronic theses. Because we found that existing ETD and scholarly electronic publishing applications did not fully meet our needs, we developed extensions to what we felt was the most promising public domain digital library software application for our needs (DSpace) to provide enhanced support for ETD publishing, and electronic scholarly publishing. We have developed enhancements to DSpace that allow single click submission of ETDs and journal articles based on templates for these types of digital content. Our system automatically records, extracts and exports metadata via XML for digital content items (theses, dissertations, journal articles) so that the author and the digital library do not have to fill out forms to do this. Our method maintains the overall DSpace workflow process and simply eliminates the initial steps by automatically extracting the metadata from the digital content item. We have modified DSpace to customize the submission process based on the collection (for instance ETDs versus journal articles). In our initial experience with the submission of master’s papers at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) we find that authors require only a fraction of the time, and are much more likely to submit material using our enhanced paradigm than if they use the standard DSpace forms.