#jiscopenbib #opentheses
On Friday 1st April 2011, Mark MacGillivray, Peter Murray-Rust and Ben O’Steen remotely attended the EURODOC conference in Vilnius, Lithuania in order to take part in an Open Theses workshop locally hosted by Daniel Mietchen and Alfredo Ferreira (funded by the JISC Open Bib project to attend in person).
During the workshop we began laying the foundations for open theses in Europe, discussing with current and recently finished postgraduate students and collecting data from those present and from anyone else interested.
As described by Peter prior to the event:
As part of our JISCOpenBIB project we are running a workshop on Open Theses at EURODOC 2011. “We” is an extended community of volunteers centered round the main JISC project. In that project we have developed an approach to the representation of Open Bibliographic metadata, and now we are extending this to theses.
Why theses? Because, surprisingly, many theses are not easily discoverable outside their universities. So we are running the workshop to see how much metadata we can collect on European theses. Things like name, university, subject, datae, title – standard metadata.
We have the beginnings of a dataset at:
The content of this datasheet will hopefully be used to populate an open theses collection in bibliographica, and in addition it is powering a mashup that will allow us to view at a glance the theses that have been published across the world, and where possible a link to the work itself:
http://benosteen.com/eurodoc.html
We also have a survey to fill in, to collect opinion around copyright issues for current / soon to be published theses, based at:
http://openbiblio.net/opentheses-survey/
The data collected by this survey is available at:
