Dissertations in IUScholarWorks

Abstract

IUScholarWorks is a set of services whose stated goal is to make the work of IU scholars freely available. One of our recent efforts towards this goal has been to ingest all IUB student dissertations into the repository and make them freely available.

Our talk will focus on the recent efforts of the IUScholarWorks team to do this. There were several challenges that the team faced in making this possible. These included issues of copyright, locating authors to gain permission, the challenge of converting the metadata into an appropriate format, and creating a ingestion workflow that would be as automated as possible. We will discuss the creation of an automated drop box processor that allows the dissertations to be ingested automatically, and a new embargo feature, which allows dissertations to be hidden until permission to display them is granted. We will conclude with a discussion of what is left to be done on this project, and ways in which the service can be improved in the future.