Community Tales: An Infrastructure for the Collaborative Construction of Digital
Theses Repositories
Lourdes Fernandez, J. Alfredo Sánchez Libraries Division
Universidad de las Américas, Puebla México
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 Data
Retrieval Services
Speech Proc.
Service s IR
Service s
Interop.
Service s
...
Digital Library Client
Virtual Referenc
e 2D & 3D
Viewers Personal
&
Group Spaces
... Mobile
Agent s
Digital Library Server
Service Level User interface Level
Multi- media Interface
s
Video Server Image
Proc.
Service s
Design of Tales:
Original Setting
student profs department registrar library
draft annotat ed
draft
thesis grade graduating students thesis
Issues: Costs, space, availability, searchability,...
Design of Tales
New Setting
shared working space
published theses
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
VRef Tales
English Stemming
Spanish Stemming
Stopwords Elimination
Vector Space Model
Extended boolean model
LSI model
Access driver to General
Access driver to Thesis
Access driver to Video
General Collection Thesis Collection Video Collection
SyReX VU-DL-A
Server Administrator
Application Level
Transformation Process level
IR model level
Access driver level
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
