 My name is Cynthia Tindohan, I'm on the board of the U.S. ETDA, and welcome to this session called Creating a More Efficient ETD Workflow at Brigham Young University. Our presenter is Ellen Amatangelo. Amatangelo. Amatangelo. Thank you. From Brigham Young University Library. And it looks like we've got folks hooked up online here virtually, and you all can see in here Ellen. Thanks Ellen. We'll proceed. All right. So if anyone, I know the room behind us is kind of loud, so let me know if I need to actually use a mic. But I think I can project, so we should be okay. So I'm going to talk about creating a more efficient ETD workflow at BYU. And this was a kind of a years long process, as I'm sure you can imagine. Things at libraries move kind of slow. But I'm going to talk, I'm just going to give you an introduction of what we did. And I'll talk about our timeline and ETD work flows throughout the years, starting with 2012. And then I'll give you a system, I call this system demo, but really I'm just going to show you what the final page looks like that we use for our ETD system. And then I'll field questions and hopefully we will get through this quickly. So here's our timeline. In 2012, we had an ETD system in place that involved a lot of steps, a lot of processes, and a lot of people, which caused some issues with it slowing. And I'll talk a little bit about that in my next slides. In 2018, the Graduate Studies Department reached out to the library and let us know that they were going to start reviewing options for updating their system. And then the library began collaboration with Grad Studies on our new systems in 2019. So we decided when they told us they were going to a new system, we decided that was a good time for us to review ours as well. Excuse me, in 2020 was when we rolled out our new systems, both Grad Studies and the library. And then this year, actually just last month, we implemented a new update that's even more streamlined for our system. So this was our original workflow in 2012. So this was already in place when I started out of the library in 2018. You can see there are a lot of steps. Each department had their own queue. This was a big problem. Our item was marked as complete. It would disappear from your queue that you were working on and go to the next person's queue and you could never see it again. So if you realized later there was a mistake or you missed something, it was a big process to try to track it down and figure out where it was in the queue. So it was very frustrating. We couldn't, because we couldn't track the progress of other departments. And I would get a lot of questions from students about where their thesis or dissertation was and I had to track down the last person that worked on it and call a lot of different people to find that out. And another issue was that ETDs moved backward from cataloging to scholarly communications, which is me. So they would create the record with the link in it, but the link was not active. So students would look up their thesis or dissertation in the catalog, click on the link, and it would just go to an era 404 error. And then they were like, where is it? And I said, well, I haven't actually received it yet, even though it was already in the catalog. So we reviewed all of that. So we had to figure out a way of working together separately. So we had our separate jobs to do, but we still needed to be able to work together and see each other's work. So this was our updated workflow in 2020. The LIT, our library IT department, figured out a way to automatically pull ETDs from the new graduate studies system into our library system. And one great thing about this was they created a shadow record in cataloging so that it wasn't viewable to the public until after I processed it into our repository and gave them a link. And then once they had the link, then they would add it to the record and make it public. So we didn't have students calling wondering why their link wasn't working. Also, we cut down the number of people involved. Actually, I'm going to go back one. So you'll see in this one, we had the library administrative offices involved because we had paper forms that had to be turned in, and they would check that everything was correct. But grad studies did away with the paper forms and went all online. And so we didn't have to deal with that anymore. So we have a faster turnaround time with this new workflow. And then surprise, the administration said we do not need to do print copies anymore for non-created works. So we had to reevaluate our workflow again. But I mean, this is great for me because we didn't have to worry about all the extra steps of doing print and creating the print record. It was great for cataloging. But we did have to reevaluate. So this is our current workflow. So for non-creative works, same thing, LIT pulls the ETDs from graduate studies into the library system. Then I get to download a spreadsheet from the system to batch load it into our repository. And I add the permanent handle link. And then after that, cataloging takes over and creates their cataloging record and adds the link in there. And then we actually have a separate process for print works, or for creative works that are print-only. We currently don't put our creative works online. But I've had some ideas about that from other people's presentations. So we may review that as well. Another odd thing was that we had people's names of who was doing what and people changed jobs. We actually had someone pass away. And their name was still in the catalog, or in the system. And it was just, every time I looked at it, I'm like, well, she's not here to do that. So I asked them to change it so that it just shows our job titles instead of her names in the system. All right. So this is where I'm going to show you what our system actually looks like. Hopefully, I'm not sure how the screen sharing works on this. So I'm going to escape from that and see. I think I need to reshare, right? Let's see. Oh, OK. No. That's actually not what I want. It's this. Can we see that? OK. So this is, oh, actually, I don't know if the people online can see that. It's just showing up here. Sorry about that. Because my screen is up there. I think you need to share the whole screen. Right. There we go. OK. Hopefully they can see it now. So this is what our system looks like. So these first two here have not been processed at all. They just came into our system. So if you click on that, oh, sorry. Hopefully it won't make me do a push. OK. So here this is what it looks like if you go into that work. And here you can see there are check boxes for each person that's doing something on this. So you just check that once you're done with each step. And I can enter the link right here. And then the cataloger can actually get that link from there to put into the catalog record. It has all the information about the author, abstract, keywords, all of that. I do have to add in the disciplines myself, which we're doing, trying to get them to add them in ahead of time. And on the main page, this is where you can download a spreadsheet. So if I wanted to process just these two that haven't been done yet, I would click that. And then click download spreadsheet. And there's my spreadsheet. And I do have to make tweaks to the spreadsheet to make sure everything formatted correctly. And there aren't any diacritic errors or things like that. It's really handy because I can just batch upload that into Digital Commons, which is the platform I use. Now these ones here, I've already processed, but have not added the handle links yet. So you can see that's what it says here. The next step is to generate the handle. If you go into there, you can see that it's check marked. And then these ones are actually print, which they have not changed to the job titles yet. But if you go into this one that's print only, you can see it has different, a different workflow here from the electronic ones. How are we doing on time? OK. And if I go here to finished ETDs, I can show you what one looks like when it's completely done. So this one has the handle link added. All of these are check marks. It's all done. Yeah. All right. So that is the end. Does anyone have any questions? Do they need to use a mic for the questions? I'll just repeat your question. I want to know how do you, if you use spreadsheets to create a couple of records, would you be able to do that using an external? Yes. Yeah. So the digital metadata librarian is the person who does the cataloging for these. And she does use the spreadsheets for that as well. Yeah. Really string what? It's so efficient. Yeah. I'm really very impressed. Now it took a lot of meanings and a lot of time to figure out what we're going to do. But yeah, it's so much easier now. And I can even have my students do a lot of my work because it's so easy to do at this point. Right. Because they haven't been adding them in. So I add them in to the spreadsheet myself. So I'm trying to work with grad studies to, because it's just not an option in their system right now. So I need to, yeah, I'm not sure why. So I need to just work with them and make sure we can add that so that the students can add the discipline in themselves. Yeah. Well, it's, I mean, I just go by like the department that they're in. So and match it up. That way. Yeah. That would be nice. So hopefully we can add that. Other questions in the room? This is an odd angle of my computer. Look at my dominoes. She doesn't have batches. So I like want, because I'll usually wait until there's several in there and they'll do them as a batch. And then she'll do them as a batch. And then she'll do them as a batch. And then she'll do them as a batch. And then she'll do them as a batch. And then she'll do them as a batch. And then she'll do the same thing. Whatever I've finished. She'll do it. I want to know if they could become a batch or is it came in? Like one at a time or as a batch process. Yeah. Yeah, she does it as a batch as well. And fun fact about the metadata librarian. She used to be my boss at the vendor that I worked for. And then we both left around the same time. I went to work at BYU and she went to work at the University of Utah. And I was on the hiring committee for her position at BYU. And so I was like, I love her. She's great. Like she's very digitally minded and very much into automating things. And so I had a lot of input on hiring her. So I'm really happy to have her there. How do the students submit their thesis or dissertation? Is there a form that they fill out and then they upload their document? Yes. I don't know all of the process of that because it's all done through graduate studies. So I don't have my hand in that. So they submit to graduate studies and then it flows to your department? Yeah. So once they've completed all the steps in their grad progress system, then our LIT will pull it into our system. And it's nice that they can do everything online. Even the signatures and everything they can do online now. Other questions for Ellen? Do we have anything online? I didn't see anything. How long does the process usually take? From start to finish, I don't know. Like from the time that they start, the student starts, I don't know. For my process, we try to make it turn around within two weeks or less. It varies. I'm trying to remember. I have it on my computer. I can look up for you, but I don't do that online. But I like how many we did last year. But over the summer, we had about 80. And then in the fall, winter, I would say we have anywhere from like 150 to 200, usually. So yeah. It's not like an astronomical amount. Yeah. Yeah, somewhere on there. I'd have to look it up, but yeah. We currently have 10,000 or close to 10,000 thesis and dissertations in the repository. But we're working on also doing all of the previous, like the print only ones. We're trying to convert them, but we have to work with copyright and decide what we're allowed to do without permissions. Do we need to reach out to the authors? All of that. So yeah, it's a big process. But we do have some that date all the way back to the 1920s right now. And we're still working on that. It'll be a long process to get everything on there. Yeah, I think we're out of time. Thank you for presenting, Ellen. That was really, you show us a lot really succinctly and quickly, smoothly. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. And thank you everyone online.