Searching
From European e-Theses
Searching e-Theses in Europe; developing a Demonstrator for a European e-Theses Portal
JISC and SURF have been active in the field for doctoral e-Theses since 2006. They have organised an international workshop in January 2006 in Amsterdam with representatives of 11 countries; Neil Jacobs has reported on it in Ariadne Magazine [1].
Furthermore, SURF and JISC organised in August 2006 in Utrecht a two days workshop with representatives of three specific e-theses projects in Europe: DIVA, Ethos and Promise of Science (from Sweden, UK and the Netherlands). They exchanged information, good practices and lessons learned and decided to set up a demonstrator on e-theses in Europe with a few countries. A small amount of seed money has been made available from these three organisations for this demonstrator. It will be presented at the international ETD 2007 conference in Uppsala, Sweden in June 2007.
At the same time, SURF, JISC, DEFF (Denmark) and the DFG (Germany) work closely together in “Knowledge Exchange”. They have organised in January 2007 a workshop on Interoperability of Institutional Repositories in these 4 countries in Europe. One of the 6 strands was related to interoperablity issues around e-Theses. A first, preliminary version of the European e-Theses Demonstrator was presented.
The aim of the European e-Theses Demonstrator project is:
- to share current practices, relevant for interoperability of e-theses repositories on an international/European level
- to get better insight in (critical) issues and potential solutions related to interoperability of e-theses repositories
- to set up a demonstrator – an interoperable portal of European e-theses, based upon the experiences of the partners involved
The following partners/countries are involved in this project:
a) DIVA (funded through BIBSAM, Sweden), JISC (UK) and SURF (the Netherlands).
b) ‘Knowledge Exchange’, an initiative of four organisations: SURF (SURF Foundation) in The Netherlands, DfG (German Research Foundation) in Germany, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in the UK, and Danish DEFF (Denmark’s Electronic Research Library).
The project will run from October 2006 until June 2007.
