The Tapir: Adding E-Theses Functionality to DSpace

Abstract

The Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories (Tapir) [1] has been developed at Edinburgh University Library [2] to help provide an E-Thesis service within an institution using DSpace [3]. It has been developed as part of the Theses Alive! [4] Project under funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [5], as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) [6] Programme.

This article looks at DSpace, the repository system initially developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT and subsequently made available as a community-owned package. We discuss how this community driven open-source development method can work when third-party tools such as the Tapir are also involved, and what issues arise. One of the primary objectives is to introduce the Tapir in detail, explaining what has been developed and what relevance this has to E-Theses. There is also a very brief introduction to the UK-recommended E-Theses Metadata set.

As a use case, we will look at the recently released Edinburgh Research Archive (ERA) [7], and will examine DSpace and the Tapir working together to provide Edinburgh's Institutional Repository.

Finally we look at how development of tools such as the Tapir can be sustained and what issues were encountered during the recent upgrade from DSpace 1.1.1 to DSpace 1.2. The future of the package is considered and some recommendations for the future are made.