Empirical Evaluation of ETD-ms Compliance for Electronic Theses and Dissertations Metadata Harvested by the NDLTD Union Catalog

There are presently a number of academic institutions that have set up Institutional Repositories (IRs) aimed, in part, to archive, manage and facilitate access to Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Increasingly, descriptive metadata associated with the ETDs produced by most of these institutions are now automatically harvested by National ETD portals and entities such as The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertation (NDLTD) Union Catalog. However, there are growing concerns regarding the quality of ETD descriptive metadata originating from most of these institutions, in particular, adherence to the ETD-ms metadata standard, the de-facto standard used to describe ETDs. This paper presents an empirical analysis of ETD-ms compliance of the metadata associated with the 7,563,684 ETDs in the NDLTD Union Catalog. ETD metadata records were harvested from the NDLTD Catalog using the OAI-PMH protocol and, subsequently, an analysis was conducted to determine compliance to the ETD-ms metadata standard. In addition, to provide a contextual overview of the potential root causes of non-compliance to ETD-ms, a case study was conducted at The University of Zambia (UNZA), in order to understand current practices and procedures employed during ingestion and association of metadata. The results indicate that compliance with the ETD-ms standard is low, with most metadata elements associated with missing values. The case study conducted at UNZA suggests that policy and awareness are crucial in facilitating compliance to metadata standards such as ETD-ms.The study could potentially provide direction on issues to be addressed during the ingestion of ETDs into IRs.