Research and Informatics Division, University Libraries

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    Annual Report for 1995/1996
    (Digital Library and Archives at Virginia Tech's University Libraries, 1996)
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    The Role of Electronic Theses and Dissertations in Graduate Education
    Eaton, John L.; McMillan, Gail; Fox, Edward A. (Council of Graduate Schools, 1998-01)
    In Spring and Summer of 1997 … news outlets, in their desire to report on controversy, largely missed the point of why it is desirable to produce theses and dissertations, and indeed many other publications, in electronic (digital) format. Hence, in this article we will seek to correct some of the misinformation released and show the benefits of the worldwide ETD initiative.
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    Open Archives Initiative
    McMillan, Gail (2000-06-01)
    This presentation, which was given at the annual meeting of the Society of Scholarly Publishing on June 1, 2000, describes the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), a protocol for exchanging content between digital repositories. The presentation outlines OAI's history, core components, key stakeholders, and ongoing developments.
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    Results of a Survey of Virginia Tech Graduates Whose Digital Theses and Dissertations Are Accessible Worldwide
    Eaton, John L.; Fox, Edward A.; McMillan, Gail (Council of Graduate Schools, 2000-11)
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's graduate students have submitted theses and dissertations as digital documents since the spring of 1997. In that time more than 2,800 digital documents have been submitted and cataloged in the Virginia Tech library. More than 1,500 of these documents are available worldwide to scholars who conduct searches through the library online catalog, the scholarly communications web site (scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/), or through one of the many search engines available to web users. Over the last two years a simple survey has been sent to 329 graduate alumni whose theses or dissertations have been available online worldwide for more than one year. The survey asked for information about the effect that making their document available has had on them. The survey also asked the graduates for comments about the digital thesis and dissertation process. There were 166 alumni who returned surveys.
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    IAWA Archivist's Report for 2001/2002
    McMillan, Gail (International Archive of Women in Architecture, 2002)
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  • Scalable Storage for Digital Libraries
    Mather, Paul (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2002-10-01)
    I propose a storage system optimised for digital libraries. Its key features are its heterogeneous scalability; its integration and exploitation of rich semantic metadata associated with digital objects; its use of a name space; and its aggressive performance optimisation in the digital library domain.
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    Process Accounting
    Gilbertson, Keith (Linux Journal, 2002-12-01)
    Standard utilities can help you collect and interpret your Linux system's process accounting data. Describes the uses of process accounting, standard process accounting commands, and example code that makes use of process accounting utilities.
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    Science of Digital Libraries(SciDL)
    Fox, Edward A.; Carroll, John M.; Fan, Patrick; Cassel, Lillian N.; Zubair, Mohammad; Maly, Kurt; McMillan, Gail; Ramakrishnan, Naren; Halbert, Martin (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2003)
    Our purpose is to ensure that people and institutions better manage information through digital libraries (DLs). Thus we address a fundamental human and social need, which is particularly urgent in the modern Information (and Knowledge) Age. Our goal is to significantly advance both the theory and state-of-theart of DLs (and other advanced information systems) - thoroughly validating our approach using highly visible testbeds. Our research objective is to leverage our formal, theory-based approach to the problems of defining, understanding, modeling, building, personalizing, and evaluating DLs. We will construct models and tools based on that theory so organizations and individuals can easily create and maintain fully functional DLs, whose components can interoperate with corresponding components of related DLs. This research should be highly meritorious intellectually. We bring together a team of senior researchers with expertise in information retrieval, human-computer interaction, scenario-based design, personalization, and componentized system development and expect to make important contributions in each of those areas. Of crucial import, however, is that we will integrate our prior research and experience to achieve breakthrough advances in the field of DLs, regarding theory, methodology, systems, and evaluation. We will extend the 5S theory, which has identified five key dimensions or onstructs underlying effective DLs: Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies. We will use that theory to describe and develop metamodels, models, and systems, which can be tailored to disciplines and/or groups, as well as personalized. We will disseminate our findings as well as provide toolkits as open source software, encouraging wide use. We will validate our work using testbeds, ensuring broad impact. We will put powerful tools into the hands of digital librarians so they may easily plan and configure tailored systems, to support an extensible set of services, including publishing, discovery, searching, browsing, recommending, and access control, handling diverse types of collections, and varied genres and classes of digital objects. With these tools, end-users will for be able to design personal DLs. Testbeds are crucial to validate scientific theories and will be thoroughly integrated into SciDL research and evaluation. We will focus on two application domains, which together should allow comprehensive validation and increase the significance of SciDL's impact on scholarly communities. One is education (through CITIDEL); the other is libraries (through DLA and OCKHAM). CITIDEL deals with content from publishers (e.g, ACM Digital Library), corporate research efforts e.g., CiteSeer), volunteer initiatives (e.g., DBLP, based on the database and logic rogramming literature), CS departments (e.g., NCSTRL, mostly technical reports), educational initiatives (e.g., Computer Science Teaching Center), and universities (e.g., theses and dissertations). DLA is a unit of the Virginia Tech library that virtually publishes scholarly communication such as faculty-edited journals and rare and unique resources including image collections and finding aids from Special Collections. The OCKHAM initiative, calling for simplicity in the library world, emphasizes a three-part solution: lightweightprotocols, component-based development, and open reference models. It provides a framework to research the deployment of the SciDL approach in libraries. Thus our choice of testbeds also will nsure that our research will have additional benefit to and impact on the fields of computing and library and information science, supporting transformations in how we learn and deal with information.
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    DLA Annual Report 2004/05
    McMillan, Gail (Digital Library and Archives at Virginia Tech's University Libraries, 2005)
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    IAWA Archivist's Annual Report 2005
    McMillan, Gail; Shaffer, Amy (International Archive of Women in Architecture, 2005-10-30)
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    DLA Annual Report 2005/06
    McMillan, Gail (Digital Library and Archives at Virginia Tech's University Libraries, 2006)
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    IAWA Archivist's Report for 2005/06
    McMillan, Gail; Vilelle, Amy Shaffer (International Archive of Women in Architecture, 2006)
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    IAWA Archivist's Report for 2006/07
    McMillan, Gail; Vilelle, Amy Shaffer (International Archive of Women in Architecture, 2007)
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    On Utilization of Contributory Storage in Desktop Grids
    Miller, Chreston; Butler, Patrick; Shah, Ankur; Butt, Ali R. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2007)
    The availability of desktop grids and shared computing platforms has popularized the use of contributory resources, such as desktops, as computing substrates for a variety of applications. However, addressing the exponentially growing storage demands of applications, especially in a contributory environment, remains a challenging research problem. In this report, we propose a transparent distributed storage system that harnesses the storage contributed by grid participants arranged in a peer-to-peer network to yield a scalable, robust, and self-organizing system. The novelty of our work lies in (i) design simplicity to facilitate actual use; (ii) support for easy integration with grid platforms; (iii) ingenious use of striping and error coding techniques to support very large data files; and (iv) the use of multicast techniques for data replication. Experimental results through simulations and an actual implementation show that our system can provide reliable and efficient storage with large file support for desktop grid applications.
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    Digital Library and Archives FY 2008 Annual Report
    (Digital Library and Archives at Virginia Tech's University Libraries, 2008)
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    Integration of VT ETD-db with Banner
    Volpe, James; McMillan, Gail; Fox, Edward A. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2008)
    The Electronic Thesis and Dissertation database (ETD-db) was developed at Virginia Tech by Digital Library and Archives for the VT Graduate School and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD). The software is freely available and over 100 universities worldwide have implemented the ETD-db system. One drawback of the system is the dependence on user keyed data. At Virginia Tech, like most other universities, there is an administrative database that could provide much of this information. The Banner Administrative System is the central administration system at Virginia Tech. Banner’s underlying database software is from Oracle. This paper will demonstrate how the ETD-db can be seamlessly integrated with an Oracle database or more specifically the Banner Administrative System, to improve the integrity of the data for ETDs.
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    ETD Preservation Survey Results: MetaArchive and NDLTD Collaborate to Provide a Distributed Preservation Network for ETDs
    McMillan, Gail (2008-06)
    Because many universities now welcome or require ETDs from their graduate students, institutions must ensure that these works will be at least as available and enduring as they were when libraries and archives preserved the bound print volumes on their shelves. To this end, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations sponsored an online survey to help gauge the digital library community's interest in a distributed digital preservation network (DDPN) specifically for ETDs. Over 90 institutions responded to the survey in early 2008, including more than one-third who heard about it from the NDTLD and ETD listservs. Based on the enthusiasm expressed in the survey, the MetaArchive Cooperative (www.metaarchive.org), which successfully deploys a DDPN among six diverse universities in the southeastern United States, is opening the Cooperative's services and resources to the NDLTD. This paper describes survey responses and aspects of the NDLTD Preservation Strategy.
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    ETD Preservation Survey Results: MetaArchive and NDLTD Collaborate to Provide a Distributed Preservation Network for ETDs
    McMillan, Gail (11th International Symposium on ETDs, 2008-06-05)
    Because many universities now welcome or require ETDs from their graduate students, institutions must ensure that these works will be at least as available and enduring as they were when libraries and archives preserved the bound print volumes on their shelves. To this end, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations sponsored an online survey to help gauge the digital library community's interest in a distributed digital preservation network (DDPN) specifically for ETDs. Over 90 institutions responded to the survey in early 2008. Based on the enthusiasm expressed in the survey, the MetaArchive Cooperative (www.metaarchive.org), which successfully deploys a DDPN among six diverse universities in the southeastern United States, is opening the Cooperative's services and resources to the NDLTD. This paper describes survey responses and aspects of the NDLTD Preservation Strategy.
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    Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Progress, Issues, and Prospects
    McMillan, Gail; Fox, Edward A.; Srinivasan, Venkat (Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Virginia Tech, 2009)
    ETDs form an important component of global scholarship and research output. Many universities around the world require, accept, or at least encourage students to submit their theses and dissertations electronically. The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), which promotes ETD activities worldwide, now has over 779,000 ETDs accessible through its Union Catalog, run by Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Other NDLTD partners provide powerful tools for searching, browsing, and visualization...