Standards Overview

Standards - Overview

In order to maintain a common 'national' look as well as keeping the process manageable and working within the design of the ADT Deposit form it is important that some basic standards of depositing theses are maintained. As this program aims to provide a national distributed database of theses, we need to lock in certain common ways to process theses.

As the Virginia Tech (VT) submission software was not designed to do some of the things required for a national project such as being attempted by the ADT Project, considerable testing and refinements were required to achieve the aim of the project. This has been a methodical process much of it having to be done on a 'test it and see' basis.

The ADT pilot program is quite different. The first and most important difference is that ADT theses have already met the conditions for Award and are catalogued accordingly by the traditional methods accepted in Australian Universities. This means that much of the administrative backend of the VT submission form program designed for all these steps in the normal submission of a thesis had to be re-programed to either do something else or 'switched off' for the current purpose of the ADT pilot.

Secondly, the pilot is testing not only the deposit of current theses already existing in commonly used electronic formats - similar to the VT process - but also the deposit of a number of retrospective theses, which are being scanned from paper into appropriate electronic format. Whilst this is similar to the process of other theses aggregators such as UMI, it is not what the VT process is designed for. The essential difference for the retrospective part of the project is that someone other than the authors of the theses will have to do the deposit to the relevant site. The VT model is based exclusively on self-submission.

Furthermore, as mentioned above, the ADT pilot project is to establish a national* (*in the context of the project 'national' means the 7 existing participating institutions) distributed database of theses, using metadata to create a meta-index which in turn will be searchable by a metadata search engine. This too has to be factored into the design modifications to the ADT version of the Deposit software.

As a result of the specific requirements of the ADT pilot project much modification has had to be done to 'close the loop' so to speak on many of the administrative steps and switches locked into the original VT software, and as well, to the Deposit form in order to, for example, automatically generate the appropriate metadata.

This necessitated taking one of the VT submission software programs and breaking it into several, including more complex screen designs, in order to meet the requirements of this project.

The ADT standards are critical to the success of the national program. These standards are few and relatively simple and do not complicate the local setup of the ADT software. The standards help ensure that consistent quality DC metadata is generated, and that this metadata can be easily found and gathered into one central searchable distributed national database.

In essence the local setup of the ADT software and program can be as flexible as desired, can be integrated into the local IT infrastructure with decisions being taken autonomously to suit local conditions and requirements - the only prerequisite being that the agreed to standards are maintained.

The ADT program is designed for participants to generate digital theses locally within the parameters set by the institution, and at an appropriate pace depending on the individual institution. The ADT tools freely provided (ie ADT software) is designed to be flexible and to not prescribe combinations of hardware and software - or even standards/conventions - that could be incompatible or problematic at the local level. The overall program is designed to facilitate the process whereby using a combination of simple filename structure, addressing protocols and the autogeneration of DC metadata, access is provided to the distributed national ADT database.