digitizationblog

ETD 2006's final day consisted of parallel sessions and a closing plenary by Jean-Claude Guédon. I attended the parallel session on archiving. The first speaker, Thomas Wollschlaeger from the Deutsche Bibliotek, described the digital archive system being developed by kopal, a collaborative effort between the Deutsche Bibliotek, Goettingen State and University Library, the Gesellschaft fuer wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH Goettingen, and IBM Deutschland. The system uses an archival repository based on the OAIS system developed at the National Library of the Netherlands and an application called koLibRI (kopal Library for Retrieval and Ingest) for content submission and access. koLibRI is open source software available at the kopal site. The second speaker was Chuck Thomas from the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), who describe DAITSS (also available under an open source license). In addition to the software, the Center makes available preservation action plans for 18 different file formats. The FCLA is doing a lot of effective, practical work in digital preservation and their website is well worth exploring. The third speaker was Gale McMillan (speaking for Kamini Santhanagopolan, who could not attend the conference) from Virginia Tech, an institution that is a pioneer in implementing ETDs. This last presentation was on a proof of concept collaboration to use LOCKSS on an international level to safeguard local content, including ETDs. Gail brought this excellent LOCKSS tutorial, written by Kamini, to the audience's attention.

Jean-Claude Guédon, a Professor of Comparative Lit at the Université de Montréal and a well known proponent of Open Access, delivered the closing plenary, which very much complimented Peter Suber's opening session (in fact, he echoed Suber's point about theses being more rigorously reviewed than some journal literature). After relating an historical introduction to Open Access starting with the 2001 Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), Professor Guédon outlined four ways that ETDs could promote the Open Access agenda: 1) make them appeal more to researchers by isolating them (together with peer reviewed articles and other material) from non-refereed institutional repository content, 2) develop ways to leverage the literature reviews that are a standard part of theses and dissertations, 3) "semantically link" theses in order to highlight interdisciplinary relationships that are not otherwise apparent, and 4) extract the "one hundred least common words" in each thesis to further interdisciplinary use.

The last three points are examples of tools that Professor Guédon challenges librarians to develop. His first point defines a different challenge. Describing academics as being primarily driven by the desire to be cited (drawing a humorous and unflattering analogy to peacocks who spread their tails to assert their dominance), he challenged librarians to "help researchers spread their tails" by developing repositories that focus on peer reviewed content and that enhanced authors' ability to track usage of their material. Near the end of his session he argued that theses, since they usually describe the most current and comprehensive research, have the potential to motivate their authors' graduate supervisors to produce better work: if enhanced repositories and tools are developed as he describes, the impact factor of theses would increase, and faculty would begin to wonder why their students' work is cited more often than their own. This gap, in turn, would push the supervisors to be less complacent.

Professor Guédon's ingenuous criticisms of both researchers and librarians was refreshing.