dyule's sandbox: The Weller ETD Project

The Weller ETD Project, formally known as Jarrow (pronounced YAR-oh) strives to assist scholars and institutions in the publication and dissemination of their work. For an overview of the project as of June 2012, check out our presentation for USETDA 2012. For all the latest development news and discussions about the Weller ETD Project then please consider joining our mailing list.

The ETD Module has two complementary goals: to collect information about the thesis from the people involved and to manage the process preparing, approving, submitting, accepting and publishing the thesis, dissertation or project. A sub-goal is to manage the organization of the defense, since that is so tightly coupled to the submission process.

The module is designed so that it can be used not just at UNBC, but at any other institution that grants post-graduate degrees. However, the process involved, and the data collected vary not just between institutions, but between thesis and dissertations, and between programs for projects. As such, the system is designed to handle varying workflows.

The workflow management system is broken into three components, which work together to allow for wildly different workflows to be configured. The three components are the Data Model, the Form Editor and the Workflow Manager. Each component is dependent on the component before it.

Much of the information that needs to be collected for the thesis publication or workflow management is available in the University’s person management system, Banner. However, there is no guarantee that UNBC will continue to use Banner for as long as this module is in use, nor can we guarantee that other Universities will use Banner, or use it in the same way UNBC does. It is also true that other universities may wish to deposit items into Institutional Repositories other than Islandora. The system builds on Drupal’s plugin architecture to allow for development of modules to plug in to the ETD System to provide information in the absence of Banner, or to allow submission to DSpace, EPrints or any other IR Solution.