Community Tales: An Infrastructure for the Collaborative Construction of Digital

Theses Repositories

Lourdes Fernandez, J. Alfredo SánchezLibraries Division

Universidad de las Américas, PueblaMéxico

ETD 2003, Berlin, Germany, May 2003

Agenda

• Context: Libraries and DLs

• ETD setting

• Design issues

• Tales functionality

• Status and ongoing work

University of the Americas, Puebla (UDLA)

• Private university in central México (City of Cholula, State of Puebla)

• About 8,000 students

• 39 bachelor’s, 21 master’s, 2 PhD thesis-requiring programs

• 600-800 theses per year

• Library has received graduate theses

• Departments handle undergraduate theses

Digital Libraries Program

• University Digital Libraries for All

• Goals:– To transform our libraries by creating virtual spaces

for facilitating knowledge access, dissemination and generation

– To build collections and services for wide user communities

– To conduct R&D in DLs

Digital Libraries Architecture for

Digital Collections (theses, images, videos, etc.) Physical Level

DBMSs, File Systems, MG, etc. Data mgmt. level

XML, Dublin Core, DTDs, OpenGIS, etc. Abstraction levels

DataRetrievalServices

SpeechProc.

Services

IRService

s

Interop. Service

s

...

Digital Library Client

VirtualReferenc

e

2D & 3DViewers

Personal &

Group Spaces

... Mobile

Agents

Digital Library Server

Service Level

User interfaceLevel

Multi-media

Interfaces

VideoServer

ImageProc.

Services

Design of Tales:Original Setting

student registrarprofs librarydepartment

draft

annotateddraft

thesis grade graduatingstudents

thesis

Issues: Costs, space, availability, searchability,...

Design of Tales New Setting

shared workingspace

publishedtheses

approved theses

committees

theses profs

restricted docs open docs

Tales Functionality: Academic Department

Tales Functionality: Academic Department

Tales Functionality: Student

Tales Functionality: Student

Tales Functionality: Advisor

Tales Functionality: Advisor

Tales Functionality: Navigation

Tales Functionality: Search

Tales Functionality: Viewing

Tales Functionality: Viewing

Related Components: Digital Annotations

Related Components: IR Server

VRefTales

EnglishStemming

SpanishStemming

StopwordsElimination

Vector SpaceModel

Extended booleanmodel

LSImodel

Access driverto General

Access driverto Thesis

Access driverto Video

General Collection Thesis Collection Video Collection

SyReX VU-DL-A

Server Administrator

Application Level

TransformationProcess level

IR model level

Access driverlevel

Data Level

IR Server

http://www.udlap.mx/~hermes

Related Components: Personal Spaces

Related Components: Digital Publishing House

Federation U-DL-A / VT / ITESM / OAI

Tales: Status

• Operating since 2000 with one pilot department

• Graduate programs joined in 2001

• University-wide ETD requirement approved starting Spring 2003

• Theses being uploaded as we speak

• Work practices being changed

U-DL-A: Ongoing Work

• Migrating to XML database

• Access from mobile devices

• Content-based image retrieval

• Detection of plagiarism

• Group spaces

• Ontological agents

• Integration

http://biblio.udlap.mx/tesis