Empirical Evaluation of ETD-ms Compliance in Institutional Repositories

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. Compliance with well-established metadata standards such as ETD-ms (Hickey et al., 2021) can arguably improve the quality of metadata.