Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Our paper, “ ETD-MS v2.0: A Proposed Extended Standard for Metadata of Electronic Theses and Dissertations ,” was accepted at the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2024) , held in Livingstone, Zambia. ETD 2024 welcomed contributions on a wide range of topics related to Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs), including digital libraries, institutional repositories, graduate education and training, open access, and open science. The symposium brought together global researchers, practitioners, and educators dedicated to advancing the creation, curation, and accessibility of ETDs.  As the number of ETDs in digital repositories continues to grow, the need for a metadata standard that aligns with the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles becomes increasingly important. Dublin Core and ETD-MS v1.1 are widely used metadata schemas for scholarly documents and ETDs. However, we identified several gaps ...

The 9th Computational Archival Science Workshop took place in Washington, DC in December, 2024   The 9th Computational Archival Science Workshop , a part of the IEEE Big Data conference, took place on December 17, 2024 in Washington, DC. The hybrid workshop featured publications from students and professors at information science departments, computer science departments, libraries, and business departments. The topics all focused on integrating artificial intelligence with archives, and the presentations and discussions also prominently featured ethics as well. The workshop included 18 papers from 21 institutions. Session 1: Trends in Computational Archival Science To start the workshop, Jennifer Proctor presented her work, " A Computational Review of the Literature of Computational Archival Science (CAS): Advancing Archival Theory in the Age of the Digital Tsunami and the Vanishing Box Problem ." She analyzed all of the previous Computational Archival Science workshop publ...

ETD 2024 took place in Livingstone, Zambia I had the privilege of participating in the 27th International Symposium on Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD 2024) , which took place as a hybrid event in Livingstone, Zambia, from November 4th to 6th, hosted by the University of Zambia . The conference provided a unique opportunity for professionals in the fields of digital libraries, open science, and graduate education to gather, collaborate, and explore advancements in Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). The hybrid nature of the event made it possible for global audiences to participate, with sessions spanning a wide range of topics, including ETD implementation use cases, open access to ETDs, the intersection of open science and ETDs, long-term preservation, the global visibility of ETDs, and the transformative role of large language models in ETD research. Day 1 at ETD 2024 Workshops ETD 2024 kicked off with workshops designed for all experience levels. " ETDs 101: N...

On Friday, March 24, 2023, we had the pleasure of hosting William A. Ingram , who holds the positions of associate dean, and executive director for information technologies in the University Libraries of Virginia Tech. During his visit, he gave a presentation entitled "Maximizing Access to Long Scholarly Documents." This talk provided an overview of his recent research endeavors, focusing on data analysis, automatic metadata extraction, and strategies for enhancing accessibility to long scholarly documents. Bill Ingram presenting "Maximizing Access to Long Scholarly Documents" Graduate Seminar Talk by Bill Ingram During his talk on his research, he shared his research " Building A Large Collection of Multi-domainElectronic Theses and Dissertations " on making the collection of long scholarly documents computationally driven and excavating knowledge from this rich information source, focusing on electronic theses and dissertations. A Large Collection of Mu...

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University In 2019, Dr. Jian Wu, my research advisor, in collaboration with Bill Ingram and Dr. Ed Fox at Virginia Tech, received a grant from IMLS (Grant#  LG-37-19-0078-198 ) on mining book-length documents, represented by electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), using machine learning and deep learning. The project addresses the lack of research on book-length documents, such as extracting metadata and segmenting scanned and born-digital long documents, using ETD as a case study. In early summer 2022, our ODU team was invited to visit the Digital Library Research Lab (DLRL) at Virginia Tech Computer Science. Our agenda included a meeting with the Virginia Tech DLRL team, student presentations from CS 5604: Information Storage and Retrieval, a graduate seminar talk by Dr. Jian Wu , and a focused discussion with the ETD team. Dr. Wu delivered a presentation titled " Towards Automatically Understanding Scientific Papers ," whic...