Podcast: Librarians say Google can Support International Education and Research

The UK's JISC's (Joint Information Systems Committee) recently released a podcast in which two librarians Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and Mike Keller at Stanford University – who are both working with Google to digitize large parts of their collections -- talk to Philip Pothen about the opportunities and the challenges of working with the private sector to digitize important scholarly resources.

European e-Theses: A Demonstrator Portal Project

SOURCE: SURFfoundation Site

(Project funded by JISC, the National Library of Sweden, and the SURFfoundation. The SURFfoundation ran the project.)

Doctoral theses contain some of the most current and valuable research produced within universities, but they are underused as research resources. Nowadays, theses and dissertations no longer have to gather dust in attics or on the shelves of university libraries. By making them available on the Internet, both the author andthe university can showcase their research, benefiting not only fellow scientists, but a broad public as well. And when they are publicly available, they are used many times more often than printed theses available only at libraries or by inter-library loan.

Current developments in Europe with respect to digital repositories encourage the visibility and retrievability of doctoral e-theses. Academic material that is “published” in an institutional repository will be picked up by worldwide search engines as well as by services that focus especially on e-theses.

JISC (UK), the National Library of Sweden and the Dutch SURFfoundation have tested the interoperability of repositories for e-theses and set up a freely accessible European e-Theses portal providing access to over 10,000 doctoral theses. For the first time ever, various repositories containing doctoral e-theses have been harvested on an international scale. Five countries were involved in the project: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The ETD demonstrator project proved that within this repository infrastructure, interoperability of doctoral theses is possible on a European or even larger scale....

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