Last week, we went live with a new site for Electronic Theses and Dissertations.
My part in the planning and coding of the site started back in January, and it was nice to see the site go into production (although we do have more work to do with the new site and shutting down the old one).
Old Site
The old site was written in PHP and only allowed PhD dissertations to be uploaded. It was a multi-step process to ingest the dissertations into the BDR: use a php script to grab the information from the database and turn it into MODS, split and massage the MODS data as needed, map the MODS data files to the corresponding PDF, and run a script to ingest the dissertation into the BDR. The process worked, but it could be improved.
New Site
The new site is written in Python and Django. It now allows for Masters theses as well as PhD dissertations to be uploaded. Ingesting the theses and dissertations into the BDR will be a simple process of selecting the theses/dissertations in the Django admin when they are ready to ingest, and running the ingest admin action – the site will know how to ingest the theses and dissertations into the BDR in the correct format.