Digital Transformation and Access to Scholarly Research: ETD Management and Digital Repository of Indian Agricultural System

Abstract

The Universities and Institutes of Higher Education and Research has vast intellectual and scholarly research information of student scholarship in form of theses and dissertations, besides other gray literature that usually remains unused or underutilized due restricted access in physical form. Institutional repositories paves the way to hold these valuable information and provides unrestricted Open Access to these valuable research content and maximizes research impact making research more productive. This article discusses the creation and developments of Digital Repository of the first Indian Agricultural University of the country and looks into the transitions made from print Theses and Dissertations (TD) into digital formats, its accessibility and management.

1. Introduction

Timely access to information is crucial for research and development and, transformational learning. In the present scenario, moving towards what we perceive as a knowledge society, faster access to right information has gained higher significance.

The academic community and researchers need fast access to scientific information and achieved scholarly output therefore, digital tools and access technologies are to be exploited /taken up by the information professionals to facilitate the research scholars and look into open sharing of scholarship beyond institutions and libraries.

The universities and Institutes for higher education and research has vast intellectual and scholarly research information particularly the student scholarship in form of theses and dissertations, that usually remains underutilized, these requires to be captured, digitized, transformed to electronic formats and brought to digital platforms in form of digital repositories. Managing electronic theses and dissertation is major twenty-first century challenge for libraries.

In Indian situation the University Grants Commission popularly known as the UGC which is a regulatory body for academics system mandated in the year 2009, the submission of academic research content of students across the universities in digital formats with aim to facilitate open access to Indian theses and dissertations to academic community worldwide [1]. The concept of promoting electronic versions of research scholarship was to ensure easy access, achieving, and to overcome some serious problems of duplication in research and deficient quality resulting from less visible and unseen factors.

Henceforth, the universities were also mandated to submit the electronic versions of students scholarship to centrally maintained digital repository, the Shodganga (hosted at INFLIBNET Center, Gandhinagar Gujart) that serves as the National Repository. The Indian Agricultural Universities and Research Institutions have separate a Digital Repository of rich accumulated knowledge in Agricultural and Allied Sciences, the Krishikosh, (hosted at Agricultural Knowledge Management Unit, Indian Institute of Agricultural Research, New Delhi) this repository has electronic records of rare books, reports, conference proceeding, bulletins besides the ETD’s. Krishikosh also provides a ready software platform to implement all aspects of Open Access policy similar to cloud service allowing individual Institutions to self manage the repository with central integration and hosting.

Shodh Ganga [2] and Krishikosh [3] the two National level Digital Repositories facilitates the libraries of different universities and institutions across the country to upload their intellectual and scholarly output of student community without having to bother much about the maintenance of the IT infrastructure and upkeep of the repository.

Many universities took digitization projects to digitize their old physical research resources or the paper copies of theses and dissertations submitted by students for inclusion/uploading in digital repositories that offered central hosting. The Libraries of Universities and Research Institutes having sound IT infrastructure created their own Institutional Repository to provide online access to their institutions publications as well students Scholarship.

The Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore established the first Open Access Institutional repository in the year 2002 named ePrints@IISc using e-print applications [4] later following the trend a number of Institutional repositories were developed and now its widespread in universities and academic Institutions. This article discusses how digital transformations took place at Pant University by digitization of the physical Theses and Dissertations, rare books and other Institutional publications.

2. About Pant University

The G.B. Pant University of Agriculture and Technology is a beacon of agricultural innovation and progress, it has played an invaluable role in shaping the agricultural landscape of India. The university has historical importance of being the first land grant pattern Agricultural University in the country established in 1960, in the state of Uttar Pradesh now Uttakhand is a symbol of successful partnership between India and the United States of America. The establishment of this university not only brought green revolution in the country but also a revolution in agricultural education, research and extension. It paved the way for setting up of 31 other agricultural universities in the country.

The University Library plays a pivotal role in supporting the Institution and its stakeholder by providing seamless access to the widest possible spectrum of information resources both online, digital, and physical resources relevant to curricular and innovative research needs of the academic community.

The university library’s mission is to provide access to learning resources and evolve services that meets the information need of the students, faculty and other administrative staff of the university for supporting the trinity of teaching, research, extension and other transformational learning experience at the university. Also, promote intellectual growth and creativity by developing and maintaining useful collections; facilitate access to Learning Resources, both physical and online resources. Teach effective use of information resources and critical evaluation skills and offer Research Assistance. The library has a collection of over 4.25 lakh learning resources including physical and electronic resources, these includes subscribed databases, consortium resources, access to open resources, and digital repository. The library is hybrid in nature and automated using state of the art tools, open sources softwares and technologies like RFID, Wi-Fi, Quick Response Codes accessible through Mobile devices, POS machines integrated with circulation terminals and facilities like SMS and e-mail alerts. The library has impressive and comfortable spaces for research, quite reading and discussions. The library website is the gateway to the most of the services provided and access to collections through online web catalog/WEBOPAC accessible everywhere.

2.1 Need for digitization of physical theses and electronic submission

The libraries traditionally are store houses of knowledge which includes both acquired learning resources through conventional publication channels and other produced by research scholars of the university in form of thesis or dissertations and project works. These valuable research content generally have limited accessibility being unpublished and remain in the stacks of the library often being unnoticed leading to duplication of research work and even subject to plagiarism. As long as the research resources submitted by the students community are not digitized, such issues are bound to arise. The Indian University Grants Commission (UGC) brought a notification in the year 2009 under minimum Standard and Procedure for award of MPhil and PhD degree mandated submission of electronic version of Theses and Dissertation by research scholars in universities with aim to facilitate Open Access of these valuable research content to the academic community worldwide. Besides leading to easy access and achieving, it would also raise the standard and quality of the research as Open Access to research content, maximizes research access leading to better impact of research and development on scientific innovations.

The move to electronic submission of theses has been a great advantage to the libraries it eases out handling hundreds of paper copies of Theses and Dissertations (TD) which can out rightly be eliminated by moving to digital submission. Additional benefits would include streamlined submission, less paper work for students and reduced processing of TD’s through bindery work flow [5]. Libraries have other advantage of saving their shelf spaces and maintenance of physical volumes.

2.2 Institutional digital repository

Institutional Repository of the library is a digital archive of scholarly research work, particularly of the students scholarship, and institution’s publications, like Annual Reports, Project Reports, Manuals developed by university faculty etc. and is accessible to the end users through Open Access platform round the clock.

The in-house Institutional Repository of Pant University was created in 2017 with grants in aid for digitization of physical learning resources from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). The repository was created using D Space, an Open Source Software, it has digitized theses and dissertations of Postgraduate and PhD students from the year 1965–2007, besides university publications, keynote addresses of previous Vice-Chancellors, Annual Reports, valuable Rare Books and other important literatures.

The university library was involved into digitization of physical Theses and Dissertations (especially PhD higher level research work) as early as 2000 under National Agricultural Innovative Project (NAIP) collaborative project, e-Granth funded by World Bank from the year 2000–2007. These digitized content were uploaded in Krishiprabha repository and later merged to Kriishikosh National Repository of Agriculture. The university mandated submission of e-theses in Compact Discs (CD) from the year 2008. Accordingly, digitally born theses from 2008 to 2023 continues to be uploaded in Krishikosh Repository, which is a centrally maintained repository by Agricultural Knowledge Management Unit of Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. The Indian University Grants Commission later in the year 2009 brought a regulation mandating students in all universities across the country to submit their post graduate research work or scholarship in e-formats to be uploaded in Central Repository called Shodganaga. Many universities have their own Institutional Repository and are also member of National Repositories like Shodganaga or Krishikosh for better management, access and flexibility of their research output.

2.3 Process of submission, uploading and access management of digital content

The university has formulated certain guidelines for submission of thesis and dissertations that is to be followed by the research scholars.

The student have to present a thesis seminar which is non-gradial before the submission of thesis both at Master’s and Doctoral levels with a satisfactory report to Dean, Post Graduate Studies(PGS) /Registrar in prescribed format. The entire research work or thesis, is subjected to anti plagiarism tool i.e. Urkund now Ouriginal as recommended by the university, with overall similarity not more than 20 percent. The research scholars are also mandated to submit a Certificate of Plagiarism check along with their thesis/dissertation submission.

The university, in 2008 mandated the submission of digital copy of thesis and dissertations to the library. Accordingly, the library has to check that thesis submitted is in order and acknowledge by issuing a certificate for receipt of the soft copy in pdf format. The e-theses submitted to the library is further processed for inclusion in the library database and digital repository. Once pdf is received, the university library’s documentation section checks the entire content and uploads the documents in the Institutional Repository using SSH file Transfer protocol.

2.4 Digitization of physical theses

The library has rich collection of valuable research content submitted by research scholars of the university since the inception of the university in the year 1960. These physical research resources in the form of Theses and Dissertations have been untapped and largely underutilized due to closed access or restricted access. Digital tools, technological advances and changing trends have brought paradigm changes in access and management of digital content, achieving and preservation. The digital content of research resources can have unrestricted open accessibility everywhere which would add to the quality of research, avoid duplications, address issues of plagiarism and maximize research access thereby, making research more impactful and productive.

2.4.1 Strategies and procedures

The university library took initiative for creating a database of digitized theses and dissertation using the most popular Open Source D Space-Repository application and hosted it to the Institutional Repository as well as the National Repository of Agriculture, the Krishikosh.

The following strategies and procedures were adopted by the library prior to digitization considering the university guidelines approved by the Academic Council of the university, regarding submission, plagiarism check, intellectual property right and the embargo period [6].

1. The electronic Theses and Dissertation submission format and preservation system to adopt or develop.

2. Select platform to host such as D Space application, e Print, Fedora or proprietary software for ETD submission such as Author café or Proquest ETD administration.

3. Where to host the digitized research content submitted by students or the etc. collections and provide access through in-house Institutional Repository, collaborative centrally managed repositories like Krishikosh or Shodganda or third party platform and to disseminate and provide access to ETD and other digital collection.

4. The format to consider and accept for submission to the repository, look into accessibility, achieving and preservation like pdf, XML formats etc.

5. Look into intellectual property right, plagiarism for fair use, access restriction and embargos.

6. Metadata standards to utilize in cataloging of electronic theses and dissertation and weather to render metadata for harvesting.

7. Develop work flows for life cycle management of ETD in future.

8. Look into access option like Restricted Access, world wide Open Access, fee based access or mixed access.

9. The IT infrastructure and technical support required, look into developing in-house infrastructure or get out sourced.

The digitization project at the university library was carried forward in 2017 taking in to consideration the above and formulated a guideline for the entire process. The scholarly research particularly the physical Theses and Dissertations were digitized on priority followed by digitization of some rare and general books taking care of copyright.

2.4.2 Digital conversion process

The university library started it digitization program in three phases. Starting with the digitization of old physical theses submitted by research scholars of the university [7].

1. Phase one: Started with World Bank funded project NAIP e-Granth subproject named Krishi Prabaha under which 506 PhD theses were digitized from the year 2000–2007 and uploaded in Krishiprabha later it was merged in Krishikosh Digital Repository.

2. Phase two: Digitization was initiated from grant in aid from ICAR in 2017, about 9651 physical theses and dissertations i.e. more than 4,00,000 pages were digitized from the year 1965 to 2000 including some Rare Reference books.

3. Phase three: Digitization of books was take-up, in the year 2021–2022 some 274 general books having 1,16,747 pages within copyright were digitized and included in the Institutional Repository.

2.4.3 Technical requirement for digitization

The digitization process at the university library’s was outsourced and subjected to certain guidelines and technical requirements in order to ensure quality scans and consistency in digital conversion, some of these includes the following:

1. The digitized output to be provided in two sets one having Raw TIFF images with spatial resolution of 300 dpi including thumbnail Image of Cover page of each theses or document provided for conversion and the other with enhanced searchable PDF-A format

2. The output to be readable with accuracy and consistency in terms of tone and color with neutral common rendering for all images scanned.

3. The scanned images as sample to be provided in different modes like colored, black and white, gray scale in any external storage media.

4. Raw images not to be cropped, and the entire document to be scanned in totality to maintain original size and shape of the document.

5. The library to ensure that the work area of digitization, and digital equipment like scanners, copy boards etc. are cleaned on regular basis to eliminate any dust or dirt in the digital images.

6. The final scanned digital images of Theses and Dissertations in PDF-A format to be legible with completeness, image quality, page sequence etc. as per the originals.

7. The digital image to be created at higher resolution so as to facilitate OCR conversion to a readable accuracy level.

8. The complete digital images to be provided in external storage media for uploading in D Space open source software.

9. The metadata for the Theses or Documents digitized to be created by library for uploading in the Digital Repository.

2.5 Uploading in repository

The complete digital images or the PDF-A of Theses and other documents digitized are technically checked for image quality, page sequence, color tone etc. by the documentation section of the library and uploaded in the Institutional Repository created through DSpace Open Source Repository application that facilitates to capture digital content, store, index, preserve and distribute the digital materials easily. The digital images in PDF-A format are uploaded to the repository through SSH file transfer protocol.

The university library adopts mixed Access to digitized Theses and Dissertations, these are uploaded in the National Repository of Krishikosh and accessible Open Access. The physical Theses digitized from the year 1965 (research work of first batch) of the university to 2000 are uploaded in Institution’s repository and accessible through campus Local Area Network (LAN) as they have not been subjected to plagiarism tools. The repository, besides students scholarship, also has good collection of other digital resources like old university publications, important dignitaries’ convocation speeches, conference proceeding, manuals, success stories and some rare books (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1.

Digitization process of physical theses and rare books at University Library of Pant University of Agriculture and Technology.

Figure 2.

Screen short of Institutional Repository G.B. Pant University of Agriculture & Technology.

2.6 Digitally born theses and dissertations

The Pant university has been accepting the students research work, theses and dissertations (submitted as part of fulfillment of their academic degrees) in digital formats from the year 2008. These valuable research content is uploaded to the National Digital Repository of Agriculture called the Krishikosh.

The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) is main granting body for all the Agricultural Universities in the county in terms of project grants and other development Assistance. The ICAR under its Open Access policy [8] mandated to upload the Institutional publication like research and popular articles, conference proceedings, success stories, case studies, annual reports, technical bulletins, summary of the completed projects, and other gray literatures available with the Agricultural Universities in the country to the Krishikosh Repository. Besides the full content of thesis and dissertations are also to be submitted in the Krishikosh repository after completion of the work (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Screen short of Krishikosh, the Digital Repository of National Agricultural Research and education system (NARES).

The Krishikosh Digital Repository facilitates decentralized processing and management of research content with central hosting to Krishikosh server located at Agricultural Knowledge Management Unit (AKMU), of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi. The platform is available to all ICAR Research Institutions and State Agricultural Universities libraries across the country, currently 108 Agricultural Universities and Research Institutes [9] are uploading their publications and research contents to Krishikosh Repository.

2.7 Conclusion

Digital Repositories facilitates quick access to research resources produced by research scholars in universities that usually lies untapped and underutilized in libraries particularly the research content held in physical formats. Technological advances over the period of time brought paradigm change in ways the information is captured, indexed, archived and disseminated over online platforms like Open Access Institutional Repositories or collaborative National Repositories like Krishikosh or Shodganaga.

Digital repositories not only facilitates easy access to research information but also controls the duplication and repetition of human resources and grants. The G.B. Pant University Library took initiative to transit from print to e-resources in 2017 by digitizing it’s old collection of rare books and research works including Theses and Dissertation from 1965 to 2000 and 2001 to 2007 in phases. The digital content was included it in National Open Access Digital Repository, Krishikosh. From 2008 onwards digital born theses are uploaded following embargo period of 1 year and accessible to academic community everywhere over the Krishikosh portal. The library facilitates restricted access to rare book collection and Institute’s publication through Institutional Repository created under D Space on local server. Digital access to research work is playing important role in keeping check on duplication, plagiarism, maintaining academic ethics and also saving National resources in terms of grants and human resources. Maintenance and updating of the research contents in Digital Repository from time to time is important activity for sustainability of the Digital Repository.