Release of TDL Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for ETDs

The Texas Digital Library has announced the release of the Texas Digital Library Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for Electronic Theses and Dissertations, v2.  These guidelines were authored by the TDL ETD Metadata Working Group.

The  guidelines are meant to provide direction to the TDL's member institutions and other ETD practitioners on metadata for electronic theses and dissertations, with a particular focus on works published through Vireo, the TDL's open source ETD workflow platform.While the guidelines provide specific guidance for Vireo development andDSpace implementation, they aim to be platform-agnostic, broadly applicable whether institutions use DSpace, Vireo, Fedora, Digital Commons, or any other repository or thesis submission system.

Changes to TDL ETD standard

The new standard incorporates the following changes:-

  • TDL ETD schema is now based on qualified Dublin Core rather than MODS. The Dublin Core standard more closely aligns with current practices of Texas Digital Library members.
  • The switch to DC from MODS necessitates changes in some element names; for example instead of “Origin Information,” use “Date” as top level element. Other changes include “Format” instead of “Physical Description,” the movement of “Location (URL)” to the “Identifier” element, and the removal of the “Record Information” section (as this information is recorded automatically by the repository system as and ).
  • New elements and encoding guidelines have been added for rights metadata, author identifiers (ORCID), and description (non-abstract) information. Recommendations have been made for “Text” to be mapped to dc.type.dcmi instead of dc.type.material.
  • To build greater awareness around best practices for aggregation of metadata and improving discoverability, additional mappings have been added (e.g. OAI-ETD and Google Scholar’s Highwire Press tags).

About the authors

The Texas Digital Library Descriptive Metadata Guidelines for Electronic Theses and Dissertations, v.2 were developed by TDL ETD Metadata Working Group: Kara Long (Baylor University); Colleen Lyon (University of Texas at Austin); Kristi Park (Texas Digital Library); Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University); Monica Rivero (Rice University); and Santi Thompson (University of Houston).