Identification of Sources for Missing Electronic Theses and Dissertations Metadata in Higher Education in Zambia

Low-quality metadata can lead to vagueness, poor recall, and inconsistent search results, underscoring the importance of robust quality assurance mechanisms in Information Retrieval systems. This study addresses the challenge of ensuring the completeness and quality of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) metadata within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Zambia. Despite the presence of 61 registered HEIs in Zambia, efforts to establish a National Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) Portal are underway to enhance accessibility to these scholarly documents. However, the diversity of ETD sources poses a challenge in maintaining metadata integrity, thereby impacting the discoverability of ETD digital objects. This research aims to identify HEIs with functional Institutional Repositories (IRs), assess the relative quality of ETD metadata from these repositories, and explore methods to address missing metadata elements. A questionnaire was distributed to all 61 HEIs to ascertain the presence of functional and interoperable IRs. Additionally, ETD metadata from HEIs with functional IRs were harvested using the OAI-PMH protocol and analyzed to evaluate metadata completeness. Furthermore, a combination of document analysis of policy documents and content analysis of randomly sampled ETD manuscripts from HEIs with functional IRs was conducted to identify potential sources of missing metadata. The findings indicate that out of 61 HEIs, only 10 (16.39%) had implemented functional IRs. Moreover, the analysis of ETD metadata reveals non-compliance with the ETD-MS metadata standard, established by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. Variations in the location of certain ETD-MS metadata elements across HEIs were observed. Identified sources of missing ETD-MS metadata elements from IRs present opportunities for automated extraction techniques to generate missing metadata, thereby facilitating the successful implementation of the Zambia National ETD portal and improving the visibility of ETDs in Zambia.