1 Challenges and Innovations in Establishing an ETD @ Indian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) is one of the common subsets of any Institutional Repositories (IRs). Considering the ever-increasing importance, inevitable demand push, long term preservation and promotion of the intellectual output of IITK, we have digitized over 9000 Masters and Doctoral dissertations runnuing in to one million pages, produced between 1963 and 2005. By meaningfully customizing and manipulating DSpace, we established our ETD system with redesigned user friendly work flow having different modes of submission, including the option for online submission from 2007 onwards. In addition to the default features offered by Dspace, we have incorporated well defined useful features like Cross Community/Collection search, Browsing by Supervisor with its item strength, Citations, Cross Ref to IITK theses, linking subjects and keywords for easy navigation and redesigned feedback for analyzing the system and for further developments. This paper identifies and explains the challenges faced, innovations made at various stages of our research project with special imphasis on mass digitization of documents having complex structure and nature, Quality control, S/W configuration and customization, H/W infrastructure, Content management and handling, Metadata extraction and injection, and setting up of a full-fledged digitization facility at our premise