The new Zambia National ETD Portal is live

Submitted by Lighton Phiri on

The DataLab Research Group is pleased to announce that the new Zambia National ETD Portal is live at https://netd.ac.zm. Launched on October 31, 2026, the portal brings together 5,926 electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from four Zambian universities, covering 1978 to 2026, in a single place where they can be searched, browsed and read. 5,818 of them (98%) link directly to the full-text PDF in the university's own repository.

The portal replaces our earlier deployment, which ran the UCT ETD Portal software and held about 5,269 records from the University of Zambia. It is the result of several years of research by DataLab students on different aspects of the problem, from metadata quality to repository coverage.

Home page of the Zambia National ETD Portal, showing master's and PhD explore cards, statistics at a glance and contributing institutions
The portal's home page: statistics at a glance and the institutions contributing ETDs.

Why a national ETD portal matters

Theses and dissertations are one of the richest records of research carried out in Zambia, but they are spread across separate institutional repositories, many with incomplete or inconsistent metadata. That makes Zambian research hard to find, both for Zambian researchers and for the rest of the world. Our work over the past few years has examined the visibility of Zambian research, the completeness and ETD-MS compliance of ETD metadata in institutional repositories, and practical ways of improving both. The portal puts those findings into practice.

What you can do with it

  • Search across all institutions at once, then narrow the results by institution, full-text availability, degree level, faculty or school, programme or discipline, degree, subject and year. Results can be sorted by best match, date published or title.
  • Browse master's and doctoral work directly from the home page: 2,202 master's and 170 doctoral records currently state their degree level.
  • Open a record page with the abstract, subject tags, file details, a Download button, a persistent link, sharing links, a Google Scholar link and a "Report a problem" form.
  • Use the data: a JSON (REST) API is available now, documented on the Developer Resources page.
Search results for malaria on the Zambia National ETD Portal, with filters and links to full-text PDFs
Search results for "malaria", with authors, year, degree, institution, subjects and links to the full text.
A record page on the Zambia National ETD Portal with the abstract and the Download panel
A record page, with the abstract, subjects and the Download panel.

How it works

A harvester collects ETD metadata from institutional repositories every day, using OAI-PMH and, where OAI-PMH is switched off or empty, alternative routes. The original metadata is kept unchanged. A cleaning stage then fixes formatting, derives faculty and degree information and records where every value came from; it is designed so that the group's machine-learning models can later fill gaps such as missing subjects. Search runs on Apache Solr with a Project Blacklight interface. The portal holds metadata only: full texts stay with each institution. The code is open source on GitHub.

Coverage, and what comes next

The current collection comes from the University of Zambia (5,736 ETDs), ZCAS University (116), the University of Lusaka (62) and Mulungushi University (12). The home page also lists all 34 institutions with Master's or PhD programmes accredited by the Higher Education Authority. Thirty of them currently show no records, because they have no public repository yet, no ETD collection, or a repository that cannot currently be harvested. We list them on purpose: it makes the national coverage gaps visible, and gives every institution a clear place to appear once its collection can be harvested.

Next, we are building an OAI-PMH data provider (oai_dc and ETD-MS) so that the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and others can harvest Zambian ETDs from one place. We are also applying the group's machine-learning work to fill in missing metadata: 3,553 records do not yet state their degree level, for example.

The research behind the portal

  • Chileshe, E. & Phiri, L. (2024). Zambia National ETD Portal: Implementation of an Interoperable National Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Portal. ETD 2024 (poster). Link
  • Chisale, A. (2024). Identification of Sources for Missing Electronic Theses and Dissertations Metadata in Higher Education in Zambia. MLIS dissertation. Link
  • Chisale, A. & Phiri, L. (2023). Towards Metadata Completeness in National ETD Portals for Improved Discoverability. ETD 2023. Link
  • Kasonde, C. & Phiri, L. (2023). Assessing and Promoting Metadata Quality for Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories Using a Policy-Driven Approach. ETD 2023. Link
  • Chanda, C., Kanfwa, C. & Mainda, C. (2023). Zambia National ETD Pre-Processing Pipeline. ICT 4014 capstone report. Link
  • Kasonde, C., Chisale, A. & Phiri, L. (2022). Empirical Evaluation of ETD-MS Compliance in Institutional Repositories. ETD 2022. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7084847
  • Chipangila, B. et al. (2021). Improved Discoverability of Digital Objects in Institutional Repositories Using Controlled Vocabularies. JCDL 2021. doi:10.1109/JCDL52503.2021.00022
  • Phiri, L. (2020). Automatic Classification of Digital Objects for Improved Metadata Quality of Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Institutional Repositories. International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies. doi:10.1504/IJMSO.2020.112804
  • Phiri, L. (2019). A Multi-Faceted Multi-Stakeholder Approach for Increased Visibility of ETDs in Zambia. Cadernos BAD. Link
  • Phiri, L. (2018). Research Visibility in the Global South: Towards Increased Online Visibility of Scholarly Research Output in Zambia. ICICT 2018. Link

More on the project: Zambia National ETD Portal project page.

Thank you

We are grateful to ZAMREN (the Zambia Research and Education Network) for hosting the portal and providing the server space. Thank you also to everyone who has worked on the project:

  • Core team: Lighton Phiri (Lead Developer and Principal Investigator) and Elijah Chileshe (Assistant Programmer/Analyst).
  • Contributors and former team members: Adrian Chisale, Cecilia Kasonde, Angela Banda, Mubanga Chibesa, Richard Mufuzi, Chanda Chilufya, Kamfwa Chileshe, Memory Phiri, Mainda Chuulu, Gift Muwele, Geoffrey Ngoma and Nkole Mulenga. See their profiles.

Get involved

  • Search the portal at https://netd.ac.zm.
  • Repository managers: make your ETD collection harvestable over OAI-PMH and email datalab@unza.zm to have it included.
  • Spotted a problem? Use "Report a problem" on any record page.
  • Developers: see the Developer Resources page.