Perumal Ganesan

Alagappa University, India

India is a country has thousands of languages, caste groups, religions, cultures, and customs coexisted for many centuries with common idea of India. Developing Institutional Repository for Theses and Dissertation for diverse research community is a herculean task. Realizing the issues, an institutional repository namely Shodhganga developed in 2010 by Information Library Network (INFLIBNET) a centre of University Grants Commission (UGC), has uploaded 212884 theses, 6400 synopsis contributed by 388 universities among 432 universities signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). For digitizing print theses, the centre recommends UGC to release grant to the universities for digitization and establishing ETD lab. Apart from managing ETD repository, it has developed standards, guidelines, softwares, metadata, assigning login and password to the coordinators with responsibilities to develop electronic theses. DSpace open source software used to develop repository supports Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) uses a qualified version of Duplin Core schema for metadata. The centre also deployed central server to harvest metadata from all ETD repositories distributed in universities and maintains backup archive for ETD submitted universities. Many issues involved while digitizing and uploading of theses were discussed while digitizing theses in India and provides idea to others to develop ETD.