An Approach for Managing Universities Electronic Theses and Dissertations

MyTO is an electronic theses dissertation (ETD) initiative to manage the collection of theses and dissertations of public universities in Malaysia. MyTO was established at the end of 2005 to be a central repository of Malaysian theses and to share the collection of theses between academic libraries in Malaysia electronically. MyTO uses the open source approach to develop a retrieval system. To realize the theses central repository, data conversion strategies were outlined and adapted the Dublin Core interoperable metadata standard in managing its resources for more flexibility in sharing the metadata across multiple systems. MyTO provides easy access and retrieval through search engines that retrieve accurate search results by simple search, combination of Boolean operators, full-text search and provide the browsing feature. MyTO also provides several format of theses access for the user such as abstract, 24 pages full-text and complete full-text.