For universities, it
seems most practical to participate in national ETD initiatives. For those
initiatives it is advisable that the National Library, which is often in charge
of archiving the country’s literature, takes a leading role. We see those
approaches in Germany within the Dissertation Online Initiative or in Canada.
The national library organizes not only the archive
structure but also the cooperation between universities,
which may serve as a central
entry point to the ETD initiative for interested parties.
Pricipal tasks of a
so - called central coordination bureau for national ETD initiatives are:
providing a
coordination structure for the cooperation of universities for political,
organisational, technological and educational issues and developments
providing an
organizational concept for funding local or regional initiatives, therefore
negociating and cooperating with national funding agencies
defining
special interest and working groups in which representatives from universities
can participate
organizing
workshops for participating universities covering special topics in order to
discuss and solve particular problems
cooperating
with the international initiatives, e.g. NDLTD, Cybertheses, MathDissInternational or PhysDiss.
In France, a national program for ETDs has been initiated by the
Ministry of Education. The electronic deposit shall be compulsory within the
end of the year. The organizational scheme adopted is defined as follows :
each
university will be in charge of the conversion of its theses and dissertation
into an archiving format (SGML/XML).
associations of
institutions may allow the mutualization of human and technical resources.
a national
institution, the Association des Bibliothèques de l'Enseignement Supérieur
(ABES) (approximative translation: Association of Universitary Libraries) has
been designated as the national central bureau.
The following text
was taken from Prof. Peter Diepold (Sourcebook for ETDs)
In 1996 four German
learned societies - comprising the fields of chemistry, informatics,
mathematics, and physics - signed a formal agreement to collaborate in
developing and using digital information and communication technologies (ICT) for
their members, scientific authors and readers. The objectives of this
collaboration were
on a local level: to bring together the activities of individual -
and often isolated - university researchers and teachers in the various
academic fields;
nation wide
globally
The initiative soon
caught public attention, leading to the enlargement of the group. Since then,
the learned societies in the fields of education, sociology, psychology,
biology, and electronic engineering have also committed themselves to the
advancement of the goals of the ``IuK-Initiative''. (IuK stands for
``Information und Kommunikation'' in German). Funds were granted for three
years by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, `Bundesministerium für
Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (www.bmbf.de).
One major project
within this initiative was the Dissertation Online project, undertaken from
April 1998 until October 2000. The activities of one of the workgroups led to a
proposal to the German Research Foundation (DFG) to fund an interdisciplinary
project to present dissertations online on the Internet, involving five
universities (Berlin, Duisburg, Erlangen, Karlsruhe, and Oldenburg), and five
academic fields, chemistry, education, informatics, mathematics, and physics..
DFG stands for ``Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft'' (http://www.dfg.de/) and is
Germany's National Science Foundation. Funding was initially restricted to one
year.
The first phase
started in the spring of 1998 and was terminated in March 1999 with a
conference held in Jena, Germany, provoking much attention among librarians and
academics. Though an infrastructure had been set up and a number of problems
were solved, much remained to be done. Therefore a subsequent proposal to DFG
was drafted. DFG funds were awarded for a second year, this time with a heavy
emphasis on the collaboration with libraries and university computing centers.
The project's research and development extended from May 1999 to October 2000.
The overall volume of both grants was some US \$ 700,000. New participants in the second proposal are
computing centers and German National Library, ``Die Deutsche Bibliothek''
(DDB) (http://www.ddb.de/)
. The project was directed by Prof. Peter Diepold, professor of computer uses
in education at Humboldt University, Berlin. (Email:peter@diepold.de)
Later, this project
was made into a national initiative with the German National Library as leading
partner, who established a buereau for coordination.
Contact address:
Dr. Nikola Korb
Die Deutsche
Bibliothek
DissOnline
Adickesallee 1
60322 Frankfurt /
Main
Germany
Email:korb@dbf.ddb.de
South
America???
Discipline specific
initiatives focus on bringing researchers and scholars from single research
fields together. In the past this has been a very succesful way to establish
active communities. These initiatives
give members of those communities the benefit of making problems such as those
that arise within global or national or generally spoken interdisciplinary
approaches or even very small discipline specific problems easier to solve.
Therefore discipline specific approaches may reach results faster and more
easily than broader projects.
The PhysNet Service
exists within the Physnet
initiative. PhysNet - the worldwide Network of Physics Departments and
Documents - provides a set of information services for physicists. PhysNet is a
distributed information service. It uses the information found on the
web-servers of the worldwide distributed physics institutions and departments
of universities as a distributed database. The restriction to those
professional institutions which are accepted by the learned societies ensure
the quality and relevance of the offered information. PhysNet serves only
professional specific information posted by the scientists themselves.
Therefore PhysNet complements the services of commercial providers. All
information of PhysNet is kept, stored and maintained by its creators at their
local institution’s server or individual homepage. The creators retain all
rights to their data. PhysNet only gathers and processes the locally available
information of physics institutions to make them globally accessible. PhysNet
is a noncommercial service. The access to information offered by PhysNet is
free to anyone. The aim of PhysNet is to provide a longtime stable and
distributed information service for physics with the collaboration of many
national and international societies and physics organizations.
The PhysNet-Services
are:
PhysDep offers a set of lists of links to nearly all Physics Institutions
worldwide ordered by continent, country and town. In addition, it offers a
HARVEST-based search engine to search across the listed Institutions.
PhysNet
Conferences, Workshops and Summer Schools offers a list of servers with Conference Lists in different fields of Physics.
PhysJobs offers a list of links to various physics-related job sites on the web.
It also implements a search facility to search for information on these sites.
Education provides online educational resources for physics (e.g. Lecture Notes,
Seminar Talks, Visualization and Demonstration Applets), listed by subject
areas.
Links
Services
-
More specifically on
the subspace PhysDoc of PhysNet: it is serving documents distributed around the
world at Physics University departments. <a
href="http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet/physdoc.html">PhysDoc</a>.
It comes with link
lists sorted by country and town/state and institution. The present content is about 100.000
documents or document lists (publication lists).
A search engine is
attached <a href="http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet/physdoc_carmen.html</a>
which will go into full operation in early 2002, which allows to search for
metadata of the documents (author, title, fulltext, keyword). A specific tool of it is to search both in
PhysDoc and in MPRESS, the respective distributed document system of
Mathematics of the International
Mathematical Union. The special appeal of Physdoc is that it
serves a ranking, and allows to find the match of a keyword to PACS
classification numbers and its respective counterpart in MSC, the respective
mathematical classification scheme. This matching is not by trying to find the
same words but by serving articles of the mathematics, which a physicist
working in the respective field would search for.
This is a major
outcome of the research programme CARMEN.
Theses and
Dissertations of Europe in Physics are served by the search engine <a
href="http://elfikom.physik.uni-oldenburg.de/dissonline/PhysDis/dis_europe.html">PhysDis</a>.
The link lists of
lists of local University physics theses are served
sorted by country, town
and University. It is operated by
Kerstin Zimmermann. PhysDis is part of
a server <a
href="http://www.dissonline.org">DissOnline</a> which serves
a list of University Libraries in Germany serving theses and dissertations,
most of them using
DC-metadata by now, and a good set of tools http://www.dissonline.org/tools.html
with guides for the authors for writing LaTeX files, upload tools to create DC
metadata by the author, by the library, and an installation guide to set up a
HARVEST gatherer and broker to join thedistributed PhysDis Service.
Responsible for the
server of this initiative is:
Prof. Eberhard Hilf
Carl von Ossietzky
University Oldenburg
Department for
Physics
Institute for
Science Networking
Ammerländer
Heerstraße 121
26129 Oldenburg
Germany
Phone: +49 (0)441
798 2742
Fax.: +49 (0)441 798
3201
Email: info@isn-oldenburg.de
WWW: www.isn-oldenburg.de
The MathDissInternational
project developed as a service within the MathNet
initiative, set up in Germany at the Konrad
Zuse institute for iinformation technology. Within the scope of the project
MathDiss International, a
permanent international online full-text document server for mathematical
dissertations will be established. In this connection, questions concerning
online presentation of the documents and the problems of long-term archiving
(from TeX resp. LaTeX documents) will be considered. They include the question
of how to homogenize such files in order to enable their later conversion into
programming languages following XML. Furthermore, the expansion of research
possibilities using online documents is being planned. Providing access to the
tables of contents, lists of tables and illustrations and bibliographies on the
LaTeX level is of top priority. Because of the structure of mathematical
documents written in LaTeX we have a lot of high quality information which
gathers dust in the archives without being used for the retrieval of scientific
documents. This situation should and could be changed because LaTeX has become
a widely accepted tool in mathematical literature.
The project MathDiss
International will be sponsored by the DFG:
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the German Research Foundation) for one year.
At the end of that year, the results will be turned over to the State and University Library of Lower
Saxony in Göttingen which has offered to provide the long-term support for
the new Math-Net Services.
The Project Program
includes:
Complete inclusion of the dissertations through metadata and the expansion of the research possibilities using the source code.
Standardization of the input files in consideration of mathematical contextual structuring.
Integration of the
services in the Math-Net by the adaptation of the project results to the
standards used there.
The creation of
forms of organization for the long-term safeguarding of the service.
International
marketing for the worldwide opening of the service.
Tests on the
conversion of mathematical dis-sertations into new mark-up languages, e.g.
MathML.
Responsible for this
project are : Prof. Dr. Günter Törner and Thorsten Bahne at the mathematics
department of the University of Duibsurg.
Address:
Gerhard-Mercator-University
Duisburg
Department 11 -
Mathematics
Lotharstr. 65
47057 Duisburg
Germany
Fon.: +49 (0)2 03
379 26 67 / 68
Fax: +49 (0)2 03
379 25 28
E-Mail: toerner@math.uni-duisburg.de / bahne@math.uni-duisburg.de
CogPrints is an
electronic archive for papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and
Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science and Biology, which uses the
self-archiving software of eprints.org
The CogPrints project is funded by the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) of the Higher Education Funding Councils, as part of its
Electronic Libraries (eLib) Programme.
ArXiv
The arXiv.org
e-Print archive (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a fully automated electronic archive
and distribution server for research papers. Covered areas include physics and
related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational
linguistics, and neuroscience. A Service of the Los Alamos National Laboratory
and the U.S. Department of Energy.