For Institutions: adding your theses and dissertations

This guide is for librarians and repository managers at Zambian higher education institutions. The portal aims to list the postgraduate theses and dissertations of every institution with a Master's or Doctoral programme accredited by the Higher Education Authority. Taking part costs nothing: the portal holds only the descriptions (metadata) and links to the full text, which stays in your institution's repository or on your website.

What the portal includes

  • Master's dissertations and theses, doctoral theses and Postgraduate Diploma reports. Undergraduate projects are left out.
  • For each one: title, author, year and degree level as a minimum; ideally also degree, supervisor(s), faculty or school, department, abstract, keywords and a public link to the PDF.
  • Missing supervisor, degree and department details are filled from the PDF's title and approval pages where possible, and are marked as "derived" on the record page.

Route 1: your institution has a repository (DSpace or similar)

The portal harvests repositories automatically every night through OAI-PMH, the standard interface built into DSpace, EPrints and most repository software. Please check the following, in this order:

  1. The repository is reachable from outside your campus. Open it from a mobile phone on mobile data. A repository that only works on the campus network, or that sits on an address such as 192.168.x.x or localhost, cannot be harvested; nor can one whose firewall answers outside visitors with "403 Forbidden".
  2. OAI-PMH is switched on. On DSpace 7 or later, opening https://<your repository>/server/oai/request?verb=Identify should show your repository's name; on DSpace 6 and earlier, /oai/request?verb=Identify.
  3. The OAI-PMH index is kept up to date. DSpace answers OAI-PMH from a separate index that is not updated when items are added or moved unless a scheduled task does it. Ask your system administrator to schedule [dspace]/bin/dspace oai import (for example nightly), and run dspace oai import -c once after moving collections. If ?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc returns "No matches" or an error while your repository shows items, the index needs rebuilding.
  4. Theses and dissertations are in their own collection(s), separate from journal articles, books, past papers and undergraduate projects, so the portal can harvest just those collections. One collection per school or faculty is ideal: the portal uses the collection names to show the faculty.
  5. Each item has a public PDF (or at least the title and approval pages), so readers can reach the full text and missing details can be filled.
  6. Useful fields are filled in, using qualified Dublin Core where your software allows: dc.contributor.advisor (supervisor), dc.type (Thesis), and degree name and level (thesis.degree.name and thesis.degree.level, or a description such as "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of …").

Then send the repository's address to datalab@unza.zm. We check the records, agree with you which collections to include, and add the repository to the nightly harvest.

Route 2: no repository yet — send a spreadsheet

An institution without a repository, or whose repository cannot be harvested yet, can contribute a CSV file with one row per thesis or dissertation.

  1. Download the CSV template. It opens in Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets and has one example row; replace it with your own rows and keep the first row (the column names) unchanged.
  2. Fill in at least identifier (your own unique number for the thesis, e.g. its accession or call number), title, author, year and degree_level (Masters, Doctoral or Postgraduate Diploma). Write names as "Surname, Given names" and separate several authors, supervisors or keywords with ||.
  3. If the full text is online (for example on your website or in a shared Google Drive folder set to "Anyone with the link"), put its link in pdf_url. Rows without a link are still listed, with the library as the place to find the thesis.
  4. Save as CSV (UTF-8) and email it to datalab@unza.zm. Better still, keep it as a Google Sheet and publish it to the web as CSV (File → Share → Publish to web → CSV): the portal then reads the latest version every night, so you only maintain the sheet. Rows you delete are removed from the portal.

Every file is checked before it is loaded, and you will get the list of any rows that need correcting. The full list of columns is on Developer Resources.

After your records are added

  • Your institution appears under "Contributing institutions" on the home page, with its own filter and OAI-PMH set, and its records are shared onwards through the portal's OAI-PMH interface and API.
  • Records are updated every night. Corrections are best made in your repository or sheet; the portal follows them.
  • Readers can report a problem with any record from its page, and we pass reports about metadata on to you.

Questions: datalab@unza.zm. The portal is run by the DataLab Research Group.