Modular Curation for ETD Repositories

Led by the University of North Texas and funded by the Institute of Museum & Library Services (IMLS), the Lifecycle Management of ETDs Project (2011-2013) is documenting lifecycle curation practices for electronic theses & dissertations (ETDs) and improving implementations for curation tools such as Clam AV (for virus checking), and JHOVE/JHOVE2, DROID, and FITS (for format identification and validation), to better facilitate the curation and management of ETD collections. The project has evaluated several open source institutional repository (IR) systems and related submission systems currently being used for ETDs to determine their provision and extensible support for such curation tools. The IRs and submission systems evaluated included E-Prints, OpenETD, ETD-db, DSpace, and Vireo. ETD programs are primarily implementing these repository software systems for quality control and workflow management to enable authors to submit ETDs (often via ProQuest), and deposit them for on-going access and long-term archival management. Some of these software systems already provide modular support for virus-checking, format identification, and format validation whereas others do not. The following paper will explain the research methodology the project took to evaluate these various tools, IRs and related submission systems; share findings; and discuss how these findings have solidified implementation improvements for the above mentioned curation technologies (Clam AV, JHOVE/JHOVE2, DROID & FITS).