Creating a National Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Portal in South Africa

A national Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) portal has been developed in South Africa to provide access to a country-specific collection of ETDs and, more importantly, to coordinate, manage, monitor and support the development of ETD programmes at the various universities. This portal required the development of a custom software solution, using a multi-tiered simple architecture of complex components. It is argued in this paper that this tiered architecture, tightly integrated into a commonly-used application/operating system framework, is a good approach to develop such central repository architectures to interconnect into the larger repository ecosystems of NDLTD and similar organisations