ethos a national oai and digitisation service for e-theses in the united kingdom chris awre ethosnet...
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EThOSA National OAI and Digitisation
Service for e-theses in the United Kingdom
Chris Awre
EThOSnet Web Services Day
June 2009
What is EThOS?
EThOS feasibility study, 2005-6o JISC project to develop a pilot OAI service provider
for e-theseso Also tasked with developing a financially viable and
sustainable business model
EThOSnet project, 2007-9o JISC project to develop a live service
British Library EThOS serviceo Live since 20th January 2009o Six-fold increase in demand
EThOS Toolkit
Dual roleo Advocate e-theses and how to implement the
necessary procedures and technologyo Establish a common process that allows an OAI
service provider to work over the many varied institutional repositories providing e-theses
Information provided by EThOS…o …but also sought from the community
http://ethostoolkit.cranfield.ac.uk/
EThOS hub
Based on a customised version of EPrints 2 for storing the e-theses
Using the ARC harvester The user interface is derived from BLDirect Bespoke development for admin interface Bespoke prototype development of web service
submission tool
Re-use and modification of existing software saved considerable time and money
Technical architecture
Metadata + content
Institutional Repository
Consortium
Metadata + content
EThOS
direct
direct
Institutional Repository
Metadata + contentMetadata
only
Web Service
Metadata + content
Metadata + content
Metadata + content
Scan
Copy?
Scan
Scan
Aggregate and deliver
Technical futures
Compound e-theseso EThOS can deal with multiple files, but not when
packaged• OAI-ORE may assist here• SWAP not that helpful
Identifierso Key to persisting relationships across repositorieso Current identifiers are unique, but not de-
referenceable• This will change when EThOS metadata becomes
harvestable
Web Services
‘Web Services’ encompasses many different potential technologieso No fixed agreement on their scopeo OAI often considered a web service
Focus of this workshop is primarily on SOAP and REST-based Web Serviceso Current interest – a technology fashion?o Recognising there is a spectrum of uses for these
But also…o Why Web Services?o Sharing experiences of use
Web Services & repositories
In context, can repositories benefit from using Web Services?o For their own immediate purposes e.g., deposito For their interaction with other systemso For federated repository services
Existing EThOS architecture does not make use of Web Service technologieso Deposit tool prototype not developed further
Today is informing EThOS, but hopefully of benefit to repository development generally
Thank you
Chris Awreo [email protected]
Kevin O’Learyo [email protected]
EThOSo http://ethos.bl.uko [email protected] o http://www.ethos.ac.uk