Being that this is my first post on the National Library of Wales Blog I thought I’d give an introduction. I’m Ioan Isaac-Richards and currently work as the Ingest Processes Manager. My role entails aiding the process of archiving electronic material within the National Library of Wales (NLW) into our repository. Also as a side role I share an interest in digital preservation, meaning ensuring our digital collections are preserved.
Since April 2009 NLW has been playing a key role in the ‘Welsh Repository Network Enhancement Project’, the primary goal for NLW was to collaboratively work with the Welsh Repository Network (WRN) team to develop a Welsh Thesis Harvesting Service.
The Welsh Thesis Harvesting Service gathers e-theses from organisations within Wales and provides access to the collection along with records of paper theses through NLW’s online catalogue under ‘Theses Collection Wales’. The organisations that we harvest from include:
Aberystwyth University
Bangor University
Cardiff University
Glynd?r University
Swansea Metropolitan University
Swansea University
Trinity University College
University of Glamorgan
University of Wales Institute Cardiff
University of Wales Newport
Once the e-theses have been harvested they need to be archived into our Fedora/VITAL repository for preservation and access purposes, a process known as ‘ingesting’.
As well as providing access to the public NLW also acts as a Welsh hub for the British Library ETHOS project. ETHOS will use ‘Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting’ (OAI-PMH) to harvest the e-theses metadata collected by NLW and then populate the ETHOS repository.
The Welsh Thesis Harvesting Service is currently live but has a very limited number of records in the collection. A launch date for the service has been set on 18th February 2011 where the WRN team and NLW will present the project, by this date we expect to have close to 200 e-theses records in the collection.
Ioan Isaac-Richards
Ingest Processes Manager