 Hi, I'm the moderator for this session, my name is Janice Robinson and We want to welcome everyone who's here so far. Hopefully I'm in the right session. It's this is a short session everyone needs to know this ends at In 20 minutes depending on what time zone you're in it's a little confusing to see Eastern time and I'm not there yet Anyway, we'd like to welcome Amanda Makula University of San Diego and Angela, how do you say her name? Perrin? Perrin, great, and you did a retrospective Electronic dissertation project and that just sounds Humongous and huge and hard so if you were successful tell us how you did it Okay, thank you Janice I'm gonna turn off my video for a minute. Okay, okay, so hopefully everybody can see My slides now Welcome, thank you for coming Angela and I are here today to talk about the retrospective Electronic dissertation project at the University of San Diego I am Amanda Makula and I am the digital Initiatives librarian and associate professor at the University of San Diego Angela, do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, good morning everyone or good afternoon depending on where you are My name is Angela Perrin and I'm the assistant archives and digital initiatives library system Okay, so we're here to talk about our project and before I start going into the details of it We just want to stress that Perhaps the most critical element To the success of this project was the collaboration with the doctoral programs By working closely with the faculty and administrators From the PhD programs and garnering their support and buy-in We were able to reach the majority of the alumni authors and contextualize this project as a joint library and graduate school endeavor and as a result of that participation was high and enthusiastic And now as we move into the later stages of the project We are seeing the beginnings of its impact and we hope to inspire other universities To initiate a similar project of their own the greater the number of openly available utbs the greater the impact and Likelihood of the creation of new knowledge So just a little bit of context About the University of San Diego and also about our institutional repository We are private Contemporary Catholic institution We have our two status, so it's high research activity And we have a little over 8,000 full-time equivalency undergraduates and graduate students Amanda, yes, you only see half of the slide because in front of the slide is your oh, that's wonderful Okay, you know what I'm saying. It's like yours. You're like the notes. Yeah, the notes I'm not gonna drag it or how you can do that No, that didn't work When you're sharing you can choose to share specific things So if you stop sharing and then you'll have the option to share like a specific view Or I can Yeah, is there is it possible? I don't know how to let me try So So I could I could just share my screen. This looks better Okay, so Angela do you want to just run the slides and Then I'll just tell you when to move to the next one. Okay. Okay. That should work Okay, hold on one second Sorry about this I thought I had it all worked out It's okay. Who's sharing now? There you go Good, so I think Angela is gonna share And That way I'll be able to see my notes as soon as it loads. Okay Okay, so Angela are you on the slide with the repository on one side and USD Yeah, great. Okay, so just a little bit More about our institutional repository We use the be presses system the digital commons system. We launched it in 2015 And we have about 30,000 items and we just hit our one million dollar one million dollar one million download mark Ray. Yeah, so that's they're celebrating that Okay, so now we'll go to the next I'm still trying to look at these notes. Okay, as soon as it loads We see it. Okay, you see it. Okay All right, so at USD one of our most highly downloaded collections In the repository is the electronic theses and dissertations however, it wasn't until 2015 that the graduate programs required their deposit So like many schools the library contained decades of print ETV's That were available only to those who could find them in the catalog and then access them on campus or Order them through interlibrary loan But we desired to share and spotlight the scholarship born at our university and open up Instantaneous access to people across the world. So we created a multi-step plan to prepare and ingest them All the way back to the early 1980s, which is when our program the program started Okay, so now you can see on this next slide This is the user the stages for the retrospective dissertation project and in this presentation we will go through the most salient aspects such as teaming up with the school of nursing school of leadership and education sciences working with pro quest to obtain electronic files prepping the files and curating the metadata for a smooth deposit and Managing the embargoes and opt-out requests as well as performing outreach to help spread the word of what we were doing Okay, next slide Okay, so now that the project is complete and as we look back to its earliest beginnings The most important component for the success was collaborating with the doctoral programs that produced the dissertations We didn't want this project to be framed as a library one We knew that in order to reach as many alumni as possible It was critical that we would approach the faculty and administrators of the doctoral programs to gain their support So we wanted the project to be transparent and a team effort in order to minimize any confusion Skepticism or distrust later on So we at the very beginning we approached the deans of the two schools School of nursing and the school of leadership and education sciences And we explained the project where our goals were and we asked for their assistance To notify the alumni and seek their participation Both of the deans were enthusiastic and agreed to work with their administration To send out a letter drafted by the library to their alumni This really set up the project for success because the alumni authors Saw it as coming from their own school Okay, next slide We're at the halfway mark just so you know We're at the halfway, okay, thank you So here's a little excerpt from the letter that we sent out It was inspired by a template from William and Mary libraries And it explained to the students what we were doing and how we wanted the entire corpus of the dissertations To be collected and accessible in one single location It gave a date by which their dissertation would be openly available And explained that they didn't have to take any action It gave them the option to opt out by filling out a simple google form If they wanted their dissertation to be limited to campus access only Um, and that would parallel the level of access To people who could go into the library and check out the print copy or request it through interlibrary love And finally the letter reminded the authors that they hold the copyright to their dissertation And that making it available through digital usd doesn't change that So the letter was signed by the school's dean and it was also shared with our deputy general counsel And they didn't recommend any changes And now I will let angela talk about some of the logistics Okay, uh, thank you amanda. So I'll be talking about how we worked with pro quest And how we prepped the files for ingestion So, um, because we wanted this project to move swiftly And also in light of the pandemic and remote working We opted to work with pro quest Um to purchase the copies of our retrospective dissertations Rather than digitize them in house It took some back and forth to negotiate with them. Some were missing in the original transfer the symptoms But ultimately we were able to get all of the files between the two programs There are 655 of them which were which more than doubled the existing number of dissertations in our institutional repository Once we had the files, we had to do some initial work with them to remove blank pages pages with hand signatures Is with a umi number Which was a remnant of their program We had hoped to automate this process with the script but couldn't figure it out. So we had to do it manually We also had to apply ocr so that the files would be fully text searchable We renamed and saved the files in a drive Where they could be batch uploaded to the repository and we also saved an archival copy So now I'll talk about embargoes and opt outs Um So, uh, we used an alumni inventory spreadsheets Um, and we sent print copies of the alumni notification letter to all alumni without email addresses These notification letter allowed the authors to opt out of having their dissertation be open access If you did not have an email or mailing address from author Then we placed a six month embargo on their dissertation We placed 15 embargoes on dissertations because we did not have contact information for the author We had four authors who did not want their dissertation to be open access So their dissertations were added to digital usd, but they were designated as campus access only We had four dissertations out of 655 that were not open access So there was a pretty um positive response to the project um among alumni Um, so lastly I'll talk about the actual ingestion of the dissertations Um, so we used batch upload spreadsheets to ingest the dissertations. We submitted about 200 at a time And started with nursing dissertations There were 14 metadata fields including title full text well keywords abstract author name author institution Disciplines degree name department dissertation committee document type embargo date doi and publication date No keywords were provided. So we used the abstracts to decipher the appropriate keywords We had pre-populated the degree name and department name But we had to make additions because there were degrees And departments that had changed since 1982 Once the dissertations were published and reviewed for accuracy, which dissertation was assigned a doi That was submitted to cross wrap And we used something called a doi assigned google sheet to keep track of the dois Which I would really Suggest as a good idea because we had 655 of them to keep track of it was really useful when I was submitting the cross wrap So now I'll toss it back to Amanda Okay, thank you, angela Um, the final the final stage Okay, thank you um The final stage really was then spreading the word so getting the word out to the schools that the project was completed They could share that news with their alumni and some cases put it in a newsletter for example We also worked with tech services To link the dissertation records in the library catalog To the live link in the repository so that people could also find the dissertations that way And now we're sharing it through other newsletters library newsletters And we'll report those kind of things and of course sharing it at conferences like this one To support others who are interested in embarking on a similar project So in conclusion these are just some of our major takeaways Um, there's definitely a lot of planning you want to think about At the very beginning and it's really helpful to look at what other schools have done And take you know pieces that you that worked well for them and see if you can apply it to your own workflow Um, try to see the big picture at the very beginning With an eye to the details as you go along For us it ended up being about a year from when we very originally started To crossing the finish line um Think about all the team members that need to be involved And get Recruit their support early on Find out who you need to work with And whether they're willing to be involved Especially like we've said the schools the programs themselves Um and work in stages So for us for example, notifying the alumni authors was one phase And then it had sub phases like compiling their contact information sending out the communication to them managing their replies Tracking the opt-out responses Etc So think about all the stages involved and then you know celebrate your success Um any time you finish a stage not just at the end but when you finish a single stage Celebrate that you know Congratulate one another and if you hit a roadblock regroup and discuss how you can address that There's one question that maybe you could answer For your no response authors Did you keep the items as archive only or did you restrict them just to your campus access? Okay for the no response. Okay. So if we had no response Um, we assumed because there was it was an opt-out So if they didn't respond they were in effect opting in So only those people that gave us the opt out were the ones that we limited it to campus access only Okay, and like angela said there were only four of those people out of 655 so We've had we had a really good Rate Our participation And this this slide just shows these are some really good resources. These are things that we used Um that were very helpful and I know now there's a new journal that's um being published and we might going forward There might be some examples of this kind of work being published in that journal as well so But with that, yeah, that is the conclusion and we do have Another minute or two for any other questions I see the question the q&a Okay, did you get additional permissions? from the authors Okay, yeah, and it wasn't out It was an opt-out policy um, so we we just only if we heard opt out that's when we um Put them For campus access only Are you It does seem like you You did this in bits and pieces and it seems like manageable is one of us could do it Uh, I'm not that skilled in ocr, but hey if you guys can do it, maybe the rest of us could do that too. So Yeah, I think if you If you conceptualize it as stages, it makes it much more manageable definitely Well, we definitely want to thank you both for sharing your successful project and everything that you've learned Um, I think our session will end here in just a minute. I think it'll just go away So thank you everyone who attended and we hope to see you in uh later sessions today Yes, and you can all feel free to um email us as well if you have follow-up questions Great. Thank you Bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye