Emory Electronic Theses & Dissertations are now in discoverE

We're happy to announce that records for Emory Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) have now been loaded into discoverE.  This provides another way to find Emory graduate and undergraduate research, beyond the search capabilities on the ETD website

(https://etd.library.emory.edu/).    In any search result, if there are Emory ETDs included, a Collection term "Emory Electronic Theses and Dissertations" will show up on the left side; clicking on this allows DiscoverE users to filter search results to Emory ETDs.Behind the scenes, metadata transformations were written and tested to translate the ETD record format (MODS) to a format easily ingestable by DiscoverE (MARCXML), and some special configurations were needed.

One of the challenging aspects was dealing with "embargoed" theses - when the author has asked that the thesis or dissertation not be made public until a certain date (often because publication is planned).  As ETD Project Manager Erika Farr, explained, even if we can't make the thesis public right away, it's important that the title of the thesis and in most cases, an abstract, be available to scholars so that they know research had been done in this area.  Occasionally an individual scholar might contact the author directly and ask for access to the thesis.  We wanted the records in DiscoverE to reflect the fact that the user couldn't "GetIt" immediately, so we had to make them different.  Records for embargoed theses now have an "Online access is restricted" status and include a Restrictions note giving the end date of the embargo period.  When the embargo expires, users will have immediate access to those theses as they do with un-embargoed theses now.

 We were also challenged by converting Tables of Contents, which usually look ok on the ETD site, into succinctly re-formatted note fields for the DiscoverE record,  so we aren't including them in DiscoverE yet.  DiscoverE users can easily see them by clicking the  "Link to resource" or "GetIt" links which take them to the ETD site page.  We hope to be able to include the tables later, and will also work on making Emory ETDs discoverable in other contexts like WorldCat and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.

 Laura Akerman, Technology and Metadata Librarian